Chapter 12

σπένδωμεν ταῖς Μνάμαςπαισὶν Μώσαιςκαὶ τῷ ΜωσάρχῳΛατοῦς υἱεῖ.[79]

In the age of Greek decadence the honors of the prosodion were sometimes paid to men. Athenæus gives this lively description of the procession which greeted Demetrius Poliorketes: "When Demetrius returned from Leucadia and Corcyra to Athens, the Athenians received him not only with incense and garlands and libations, but they even sent out processional choruses, and greeted him with ithyphallic hymns and dances: stationed by his chariot-wheels, they sang and danced and chanted that he alone was a real god; the rest were sleeping, or were on a journey, or did not exist; they called him son of Poseidon and Aphrodite, eminent for beauty, universal in his goodness to mankind; thenthey prayed and besought and supplicated him like a god." The hymn which they sang may be read in Bergk, vol. iii. p. 1314. It is one of the most interesting relics of antiquity.[80]

For the sake of its rare and curious metre alternating the iambic and trochaic rhythms, I have faced the difficulties of translation, and have ventured on the following version:

See how the mightiest gods, and best-belovedTowards our town are winging!For lo, Demeter and DemetriusThis glad day is bringing!She to perform her daughter's solemn rites;Mystic pomps attend her:He, joyous as a god should be, and blithe,Comes with laughing splendor.Show forth your triumph! Friends all, troop around!Let him shine above you!Be you the stars to circle him with love;He's the sun to love you.Hail, offspring of Poseidon, powerful god,Child of Aphrodite!The other gods keep far away from earth;Have no ears, though mighty;They are not, or they will not hear us wail:Thee our eye beholdeth;Not wood, not stone, but living, breathing, real,Thee our prayer enfoldeth.First give us peace! Give, dearest, for thou canst:Thou art Lord and Master!The Sphinx, who not on Thebes, but on all GreeceSwoops to gloat and pasture;The Ætolian, he who sits upon his rock,Like that old disaster;He feeds upon our flesh and blood, and weCan no longer labor;For it was ever thus the Ætolian thiefPreyed upon his neighbor;Him punish thou, or if not thou, then sendŒdipus to harm him,Who'll cast this Sphinx down from his cliff of pride,Or to stone will charm him.

The Sphinx, who not on Thebes, but on all GreeceSwoops to gloat and pasture;The Ætolian, he who sits upon his rock,Like that old disaster;He feeds upon our flesh and blood, and weCan no longer labor;For it was ever thus the Ætolian thiefPreyed upon his neighbor;Him punish thou, or if not thou, then sendŒdipus to harm him,Who'll cast this Sphinx down from his cliff of pride,Or to stone will charm him.

A special kind of prosodia were the Parthenia, or processional hymns of maidens; such, for example, as the Athenian girls sang to Pallas while they climbed the staircase of the Parthenon. Aristophanes has presented us with a beautiful example of antiphonal Parthenia at the end of hisLysistrata, where choruses of Athenian and Spartan girls sing turn and turn about in rivalry. Alcman won his laurels at Sparta by the composition of this kind of hymn. A fragment (Bergk, p. 842) only remains to show what they were like: "No more, ye honey-voiced, sweet-singing maidens, can my limbs support me: oh, oh, that I were a cerylus, who skims the flower of the sea with halcyons, of a dauntless heart, the sea-blue bird of spring!" Such Parthenia, when addressed to Phœbus, were called Daphnephorica; for the maidens carried laurel-branches to his shrine. A more charming picture cannot be conceived than that which is presented to our fancy by these white-robed virgins, each with her rod of bay and crown of laurel-leaves, ascending the marble steps of the temple of the Dorian god. John Lyly, who had imbibed the spirit of Greek life, has written a hymn, "Sing to Apollo, god of day!" which might well have been used at such a festival.

The prosodia of which we have been speaking were addressed to all the gods. But there were other choric hymns with special names, consecrated to the service of particular deities. Of this sort was the pæan, sung to Phœbus in his double character of a victorious and a healing god. The pæan was both a song of war and of peace; it was the proper accompaniment of the battle and the feast. In like manner the hyporchem, which, as its name implies, was always accompanied by a dance, originally formed a portion of the cult of Phœbus. The chorus described in theIliad, xviii. 590, and the glorious pageant of Olympus celebrated in theHymn to Apollo, 186, were, technically speaking, hyporchems. As the pæan and the hyporchem were originally consecrated to Apollo, so the dithyramb and the phallic hymn belonged to Dionysus. The dithyramb never lost the tempestuous and enthusiastic character of Bacchic revelry; but in time it grew from being a wild celebration of the mystic sufferings of Bacchus into the sublime art of tragedy. Arion forms the point of this transition. He seems to have thrown a greater reality of passion and dramatic action into his choruses, which led to the introduction of dialogue, and so by degrees to tragedy proper. Meanwhile the dithyramb, as a tumultuous choric song, retained its individual existence. As Arion had devoted his genius to the cultivation of the tragic or cyclic chorus, Lasos, the master of Pindar, stamped his own style upon the dithyrambic ode as it continued to be used at festive meetings. Every town in Greece had its chorodidascalus, a functionary whom Aristophanes ridicules in the person of Kinesias in theBirds.[81]He is introduced warbling the wildest, windiest nonsense, and entreating to have a pair of wings given him that he may chase his airy ideas through the sky. The phallic hymn, from which in like manner comedy took its origin, was a mad outpouring of purely animal exultation. Here the wine-god was celebrated as the pleasure-loving, drunken, lascivious deity. Aristophanes, again, our truest source of informationrespecting all the details of Greek life, supplies us with an instance of one of these songs, and of the simple rites which accompanied its performance.[82]In theFrogs, also, the Master of Comedy has presented us with an elaborate series of Bacchic hymns.[83]Here the phallic and satyric element is combined with something of the grandeur of the dithyrambic ode; the curious mixture of sarcasm, obscenity, and splendid poetry offers a striking instance of Greek religious feeling, so incomprehensible to modern minds. It is greatly to be regretted that our information respecting the dithyramb and the phallic chorus has to be obtained from a dramatic poet rather than from any perfect specimens of these compositions. Bergk's Collection, full as it is, yields nothing but hints and fragments.[84]

Passing to the lyrics, which were connected with circumstances of human life, the first to be mentioned are epinikia, or odes sung in honor of victors at the games. Of these, in the splendid series of Pindar and in the fragments of Simonides, we have abundant examples. We are also able to trace their development from the simple exclamation of τήνελλα ὦ καλλίνικε,[85]the composition of which was ascribed to Archilochus, and which Pindar looked back upon with scornful triumph. Indeed, in his hands, to use the phrase of Wordsworth, "the thing became a trumpet, whence he blew soul-animating strains." The epinikian ode was the most costly and splendid flower in the victor's wreath. Pindar compares the praise which he pours forth for Diagoras the Rhodian to noblest wine foaming in the golden goblet, which a father gives to honor his son-in-law, the prime and jewel of his treasure-house.

The occasions on which such odes were sung were various—eitherwhen the victor was being crowned, or when he was returning to his native city, or by torchlight during the evening of the victorious day, or at a banquet after his reception in his home. On one of these occasions the poet would appear with his trained band of singers and musicians, and, taking his stand by the altar of the god to whom the victor offered a thanksgiving sacrifice, would guide the choric stream of song through strophe and antistrophe and epode, in sonorous labyrinths of eulogy and mythological allusion—prayer, praise, and admonition mingling with the fumes of intoxicating poetry. Of all these occasions the most striking must have been the commemoration of a victory in the temple of Zeus at Altis, near Olympia, by moonlight. The contest has taken place during the day; and the olive-wreath has been placed upon the head, say, of Myronides, from Thebes. Having rested from his labors, after the bath and the banquet, crowned with his victorious garland and with fillets bound about his hair, he stands surrounded by his friends. Zeus, in ivory and gold, looks down from his marble pedestal. Through the open roof shines a moon of the south, glancing aslant on statue and column and carved bass-relief; while below, the red glare of torches, paling its silver, flickers with fitful crimson on the glowing faces of young men. Then swells the choral hymn, with praise of Myronides and praise of Thebes, and stormy flights of fancy shooting beyond sun and stars. At its close follow libation, dedication, hands upraised in prayer to Zeus. Then the trampling of sandalled feet upon the marble floor, the procession with songs still sounding to the temple-gate, and on a sudden, lo! the full moon, the hills and plain and solemn night of stars. The band disperses, and the Comus succeeds to the thanksgiving.

As a contrast to the epinikia we may take the different kinds of threnoi, or funeral songs. The most primitive was called epikedeion, a dirge or coronach, improvised by women over the bodies of the dead.[86]The lamentations of Helen and Andromache for Hector, and of the slave-girls for Patroclus, are Homeric instances of this species. Euripides imitates them in his tragedies—in the dirge sung by Antigone, for instance, in thePhœnissæ, and in the wailings of Hecuba for Astyanax in theTroades. A different kind of threnos were the songs of Linus, Hyacinth, Adonis, and others, to which I have already alluded in the beginning of this chapter. The finest extant specimen of this sort is Bion'sLament for Adonis, which, however, was composed in the idyllic age, when the hexameter had been substituted for the richer and more splendid lyric metres. A third class of threnos consisted of complex choral hymns composed by poets like Simonides or Pindar, to be sung at funeral solemnities. Many of our most precious lyric fragments, those which embody philosophical reflections on life and dim previsions of another world, belong to dirges of this elaborate kind.

Marriage festivals offered another occasion for lyric poetry. The hymeneal, sung during the wedding ceremony, the epithalamium, chanted at the house of the bridegroom, and many other species, have been defined by the grammarians. Unfortunately we possess nothing but the merestdébrisof any true Greek ode of this kind. Sappho's are the best. We have to study the imitations of her style in Catullus, the marriage chorus at the end of theBirdsof Aristophanes, and the epithalamium of Helen by Theocritus, in order to form a remote conception of what a Sapphic marriage chorus might have been. In banquet songs we are more fortunate. Abundant are the parœnia of Alcæus, Anacreon, Theognis, and others. Scolia, or catches, so called from their irregularmetrical structure, were also in vogue at banquets; and of these popular songs a sufficient number are preserved. A drunken passage in the works of Aristophanes brings before us after a lively fashion the ceremonies with which the scolion and the wine-cup circled the symposium together.[87]Of all these catches the most celebrated in ancient days was the panegyric of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, attributed to Callistratus. As I have the opportunity of printing from MS. a translation of this song by the late Professor Conington, I will introduce it here:

In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive,Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,Who, striking the tyrant down,Made Athens a freeman's town.Harmodius, our darling, thou art not dead!Thou liv'st in the isles of the blest, 'tis said,With Achilles first in speed,And Tydides Diomede.In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive,Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,When the twain on Athena's dayDid the tyrant Hipparchus slay.For aye shall your fame in the land be told,Harmodius and Aristogeiton bold,Who, striking the tyrant down,Made Athens a freeman's town.

In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive,Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,Who, striking the tyrant down,Made Athens a freeman's town.

Harmodius, our darling, thou art not dead!Thou liv'st in the isles of the blest, 'tis said,With Achilles first in speed,And Tydides Diomede.

In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive,Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave,When the twain on Athena's dayDid the tyrant Hipparchus slay.

For aye shall your fame in the land be told,Harmodius and Aristogeiton bold,Who, striking the tyrant down,Made Athens a freeman's town.

The whole collection of scolia in Bergk (pp. 1287-1296) is full of interest, since these simple and popular songs carry us back more freshly than elaborate poems to the life of the Greeks. One of these, attributed to Simonides, sums up the qualities which a Greek most desired:

ὑγιαίνειν μὲν ἄριστον ἀνδρὶ θνατῷ,δεύτερον δὲ φυὰν καλὸν γενέσθαι,τὸ τρίτον δὲ πλουτεῖν ἀδόλως,καὶ τὸ τέταρτον ἡβᾶν μετὰ τῶν φίλων.[88]

Unlike Solomon, when asked what he would take from the Lord as a gift, the Greek poet does not answer Wisdom, but first Health, secondly Beauty, thirdly Wealth untainted by fraud, and fourthly Youth in the society of friends. The last thought of this little poem is expanded very beautifully in another scolion:

σύν μοι πῖνε, συνήβα, συνέρα, συστεφανηφόρει,σύν μοι μαινομένῳ μαίνεο, σὺν σώφρονι σωφρόνει:

"Drink with me, be young with me, love with me, wear crowns with me, when I am mad be mad with me, be wise with me when I am wise." The verb συνηβᾶν is almost untranslatable. Of another kind is the scolion of Hybrias the Cretan, translated thus into English verse by Thomas Campbell:

My wealth's a burly spear and brand,And a right good shield of hides untanned,Which on my arm I buckle:With these I plough, I reap, I sow,With these I make the sweet vintage flow,And all around me truckle.

But your wights that take no pride to wieldA massy spear and well-made shield,Nor joy to draw the sword:Oh, I bring those heartless, hapless drones,Down in a trice on their marrow-bones,To call me king and lord.

This catch brings before our eyes in a very lively picture the lawless Freiherr of early Dorian barbarism. Another species of the scolion is more sentimental: "Would that I were a fair lyre of ivory, and that fair boys bore me to the Bacchic Choir; would that I were a fair, new, and mighty golden jar, and that a fair woman bore me with a pure heart." Again, we find moral precepts in these catches. "Whoso betrayeth not a friend hath great honor among men and gods, according to my mind."

While on the subject of scolia, it will not do to pass over the most splendid specimen we have in this order of composition. It is a fragment from Pindar (Bergk, p. 327), to translate which, I feel, is profanation:

O soul, 'tis thine in season meet,To pluck of love the blossom sweet,When hearts are young:But he who sees the blazing beams,The light that fromthatforehead streams,And is not stung;—Who is not storm-tost with desire,—Lo! he, I ween, with frozen fire,Of adamant or stubborn steel,Is forged in his cold heart that cannot feel.Disowned, dishonored, and deniedBy Aphrodite glittering-eyed,He either toilsAll day for gold, a sordid gain,Or bent beneath a woman's reign,In petty broils,Endures her insolence, a drudge,Compelled the common path to trudge;But I, apart from this disease,Wasting away like wax of holy bees,Which the sun's splendor wounds, do pine,Whene'er I see the young-limbed bloom divineOf boys. Lo! look you well; for here in Tenedos,Grace and Persuasion dwell in young Theoxenos.

Disowned, dishonored, and deniedBy Aphrodite glittering-eyed,He either toilsAll day for gold, a sordid gain,Or bent beneath a woman's reign,In petty broils,Endures her insolence, a drudge,Compelled the common path to trudge;But I, apart from this disease,Wasting away like wax of holy bees,Which the sun's splendor wounds, do pine,Whene'er I see the young-limbed bloom divineOf boys. Lo! look you well; for here in Tenedos,Grace and Persuasion dwell in young Theoxenos.

Of the many different kinds of lyric poetry consecrated to love and intended for recitation by single musicians, it is not possible to give a strict account. That the Greeks cultivated the serenade is clear from a passage in theEcclesiazusæof Aristophanes, which contains a graceful though gross specimen of this kind of song. The children's songs (Bergk, 1303-1307) about flowers, tortoises, and hobgoblins are too curiously illustrative of Greek manners not to merit a passing notice, nor can I here omit a translation of the only Swallow-song preserved to us. Athenæus, to whom we owe this curious relic, localizes the Chelidonisma in Rhodes, referring it particularly to the district of Lindus.[89]In spring time the children went round the town, collecting doles and presents from house to house, and singing as they went:

She is here, she is here, the swallow!Fair seasons bringing, fair years to follow!Her belly is white,Her back black as night!From your rich houseRoll forth to usTarts, wine, and cheese:Or if not these,Oatmeal and barley-cakeThe swallow deigns to take.

What shall we have? or must we hence away?Thanks, if you give; if not, we'll make you pay!The house-door hence we'll carry;Nor shall the lintel tarry;From hearth and home your wife we'll rob;She is so small,To take her off will be an easy job!Whate'er you give, give largess free!Up! open, open to the swallow's call!No grave old men, but merry children we!

After this lengthy, but far from exhaustive, enumeration of the kinds and occasions of lyrical poetry in Greece, we may turn to consider the different parts played in their cultivation by the several chief families of Hellas. It is remarkable that all the great writers of elegies and iambics were Ionians; Theognis of Megara is the only Dorian whose genuine poems are celebrated; and against his we have to set the bulk of Solon, Mimnermus, Phocylides, Callinus, and Tyrtæus, all Ionians.[90]Not a single Dorian poet seems to have composed iambics, the rigid discipline and strong sense of decorum in a Dorian state probably rendering the cultivation of satire impossible. We are told that the Spartans would not even suffer Archilochus to lodge as a stranger among them. But when we turn to lyric poetry—to the poetry of stanzas and strophes—the two other families of the Greeks, the Æolians and the Dorians, take the lead. As a Dorian was exceptional among the elegists, so now an Ionian will be comparatively rare among the lyrists. So great was the æsthetical conservatism of the Greeks that throughout their history their primitive distinctions of dialect are never lost sight of. When the Athenians developed tragedy, they wrote their iambics in pure Attic, but they preserved a Dorian tone in their choruses. The epic hexameter and the elegy, on the other hand, retained an Ionian characterto the last.

The paths struck out by the Æolians and Dorians in the domain of lyric poetry were so different as to justify us in speaking of two distinct species. When Milton in theParadise Regainedcatalogued the poetical achievements of the Greeks, he assigned their true place to these two species in the line—

Æolian charms and Dorian lyric odes.

The poets and poetesses of the Ægean Islands cultivated a rapid and effusive style, polishing their passionate stanzas so exquisitely that they well deserve the name of charms. The Dorian poets, inspired by a graver and more sustained imagination, composed long and complex odes for the celebration of gods and heroes. The Æolian singer dwelt on his own joys and sorrows; the Dorian bard addressed some deity, or told the tales of demigods and warriors. The Æolian chanted his stanzas to the lyre or flute; the Dorian trained a chorus, who gave utterance to his verse in dance and song.

Though the Æolians were the eldest family of the Hellenic stock, their language retaining more than any other dialect the primitive character of the Greek tongue, yet they never rose to such historical importance as the Dorians and Ionians. Geographically they were scattered in such a way as to have no definite centre. We find Æolians in Elis, in Bœotia, in Lesbos, and on the Asian sea-coast south of the Troad. But in course of time the Æolians of Elis and Bœotia were almost identified with the Dorians as allies of Sparta, while the Æolians of Lesbos and Asia merged themselves in the Athenian empire. Politically, mentally, and morally, they showed less activity than their cousins of the blood of Dorus and Ion. They produced no law-givers like Lycurgus and Solon; they had no metropolis like Sparta and Athens; they played no prominent part in the struggle with Persia, or in the Peloponnesian war. In the later days of Greece, Thebes, when Dorized by contact with the Spartans, for a short time headed Greece, and flourished with brief splendor. But it would not be accurate to give to the Æolian character the credit of the fame of Thebes at that advanced period. Yet, for a certain space of time, the Æolians occupied the very foreground of Greek literature, and blazed out with a brilliance of lyrical splendor that has never been surpassed. There seems to have been something passionate and intense in their temperament, which made the emotions of the Dorian and the Ionian feeble by comparison. Lesbos, the centre of Æolian culture, was the island of overmastering passions: the personality of the Greek race burned there with a fierce and steady flame of concentrated feeling. The energies which the Ionians divided between pleasure, politics, trade, legislation, science, and the arts, and which the Dorians turned to war and state-craft and social economy, were restrained by the Æolians within the sphere of individual emotions, ready to burst forth volcanically. Nowhere in any age of Greek history, or in any part of Hellas, did the love of physical beauty, the sensibility to radiant scenes of nature, the consuming fervor of personal feeling, assume such grand proportions and receive so illustrious an expression as they did in Lesbos. At first this passion blossomed into the most exquisite lyrical poetry that the world has known: this was the flower-time of the Æolians, their brief and brilliant spring. But the fruit it bore was bitter and rotten. Lesbos became a byword for corruption. The passions which for a moment had flamed into the gorgeousness of art, burning their envelope of words and images, remained a mere furnace of sensuality, from which no expression of the divine in human life could be expected. In this the Lesbian poets were not unlike the Provençal troubadours, who made a literature of love, or the Venetian painters, who based their art upon thebeauty of color, the voluptuous charms of the flesh. In each case the motive of enthusiastic passion sufficed to produce a dazzling result. But as soon as its freshness was exhausted there was nothing left for art to live on, and mere decadence to sensuality ensued.

Several circumstances contributed to aid the development of lyric poetry in Lesbos. The customs of the Æolians permitted more social and domestic freedom than was common in Greece. Æolian women were not confined to the harem like Ionians, or subjected to the rigorous discipline of the Spartans. While mixing freely with male society, they were highly educated, and accustomed to express their sentiments to an extent unknown elsewhere in history—until, indeed, the present time. The Lesbian ladies applied themselves successfully to literature. They formed clubs for the cultivation of poetry and music. They studied the arts of beauty, and sought to refine metrical forms and diction. Nor did they confine themselves to the scientific side of art. Unrestrained by public opinion, and passionate for the beautiful, they cultivated their senses and emotions, and indulged their wildest passions. All the luxuries and elegances of life which that climate and the rich valleys of Lesbos could afford were at their disposal; exquisite gardens, where the rose and hyacinth spread perfume; river-beds ablaze with the oleander and wild pomegranate; olive-groves and fountains, where the cyclamen and violet flowered with feathery maiden-hair; pine-tree-shadowed coves, where they might bathe in the calm of a tideless sea; fruits such as only the southern sun and sea-wind can mature; marble cliffs, starred with jonquil and anemone in spring, aromatic with myrtle and lentisk and samphire and wild rosemary through all the months; nightingales that sang in May; temples dim with dusky gold and bright with ivory; statues and frescos of heroic forms. In such scenes as these the Lesbian poets lived, and thought of love. When we read their poems, we seem to have the perfumes, colors, sounds, and lights of that luxurious land distilled in verse. Nor was a brief but biting winter wanting to give tone to their nerves, and, by contrast with the summer, to prevent the palling of so much luxury on sated senses. The voluptuousness of Æolian poetry is not like that of Persian or Arabian art. It is Greek in its self-restraint, proportion, tact. We find nothing burdensome in its sweetness. All is so rhythmically and sublimely ordered in the poems of Sappho that supreme art lends solemnity and grandeur to the expression of unmitigated passion.

The world has suffered no greater literary loss than the loss of Sappho's poems. So perfect are the smallest fragments preserved in Bergk'sCollection—the line, for example (p. 890), ἦρος ἄγγελος ἰμερόφωνος ἀήδων,[91]which Ben Jonson fancifully translated, "the dear glad angel of the spring, the nightingale"—that we muse in a sad rapture of astonishment to think what the complete poems must have been. Among the ancients Sappho enjoyed a unique renown. She was called "The Poetess," as Homer was called "The Poet." Aristotle quoted without question a judgment that placed her in the same rank as Homer and Archilochus. Plato in thePhædrusmentioned her as the tenth muse. Solon, hearing one of her poems, prayed that he might not see death till he had learned it. Strabo speaks of her genius with religious awe. Longinus cites her love-ode as a specimen of poetical sublimity. The epigrammatists call her Child of Aphrodite and Eros, nursling of the Graces and Persuasion, pride ofHellas, peer of Muses, companion of Apollo. Nowhere is a hint whispered that her poetry was aught but perfect. As far as we can judge, these praises were strictly just. Of all the poets of the world, of all the illustrious artists of all literatures, Sappho is the one whose every word has a peculiar and unmistakable perfume, a seal of absolute perfection and inimitable grace. In her art she was unerring. Even Archilochus seems commonplace when compared with her exquisite rarity of phrase.

About her life—her brother Charaxus, her daughter Cleis, her rejection of Alcæus and her suit to Phaon, her love for Atthis and Anactoria, her leap from the Leucadian cliff—we know so very little, and that little is so confused with mythology and turbid with the scandal of the comic poets, that it is not worth while to rake up once again the old materials for hypothetical conclusions. There is enough of heart-devouring passion in Sappho's own verse without the legends of Phaon and the cliff of Leucas. The reality casts all fiction into the shade; for nowhere, except, perhaps, in some Persian or Provençal love-songs, can be found more ardent expressions of overmastering emotion. Whether addressing the maidens, whom even in Elysium, as Horace says, Sappho could not forget; or embodying the profounder yearnings of an intense soul after beauty, which has never on earth existed, but which inflames the hearts of noblest poets, robbing their eyes of sleep and giving them the bitterness of tears to drink—these dazzling fragments,

Which still, like sparkles of Greek fire,Burn on through time and ne'er expire,

are the ultimate and finished forms of passionate utterance, diamonds, topazes, and blazing rubies, in which the fire of the soul is crystallized forever. Adequately to translate Sappho was beyond the power of even Catullus: that love-ode which Longinuscalled "not one passion, but a congress of passions," and which a Greek physician copied into his book of diagnoses as a compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion, appears but languid in its Latin dress of "Ille mi par." Far less has any modern poet succeeded in the task: Rossetti, who deals so skilfully with Dante and Villon, is comparatively tame when he approaches Sappho. Instead of attempting, therefore, to interpret for English readers the charm of Sappho's style,[92]it is best to refer to pp. 874-924 of Bergk, where every vestige that is left of her is shrined.

Beside Sappho, Alcæus pales. His drinking-songs and war-songs have, indeed, great beauty; but they are not to be named in the same breath, for perfection of style, with the stanzas of Sappho. Of his life we know a few not wholly uninteresting incidents. He was a noble of Mitylene, the capital of Lesbos, where he flourished as early as 611 B.C. Alcæus belonged to a family of distinguished men. His brothers Cicis and Antimenidas upheld the party of the oligarchy against the tyrant Melanchrus; and during the troubles which agitated Mitylene after the fall of this despot, while other petty tyrants—Myrsilus, Megalagyrus, and the Cleanactids—were attempting to subdue the island, the three brothers ranged themselves uniformly on the side of the aristocracy. At first they seem to have been friendly with Pittacus. It was while fighting at his side against the Athenians at Sigeum that Alcæus threw his shield away—- an exploit which, like Archilochus, he celebrated in a poem without apparently damaging his reputation for valor. Being a stout soldier, a violent partisan, the bard of revolutions, and the brother of a pair ofheroes, he could trifle with this little accident, which less doughty warriors must have concealed. When Pittacus was chosen Æsymnetes, or dictator with despotic power for the preservation of public order, in 589 B.C., Alcæus and his brothers went into opposition and were exiled. All three of them were what in modern politics we should call High Tories. They could not endure the least approach to popular government, the slightest infringement of the rights of the nobility. During his exile Alcæus employed his poetic faculty in vituperating Pittacus. His satires were esteemed almost as pungent as those of Archilochus. But the liberal-minded ruler did not resent them. When Alcæus was on one occasion taken prisoner, he set him free, remarking that "forgiveness is better than revenge." Alcæus lived to be reconciled with him and to recognize his merits. As a trait in the domestic life and fortunes of the Greeks of this time, it is worth mentioning that Alcæus took refuge in Egypt during his banishment from Lesbos, and that his brother Antimenidas entered the service of the king of Babylon. In the same way two Englishmen in the times of the Edwards might have travelled in Germany or become soldiers of the Republic of Florence. Of the Greek oligarch who lent his sword to Nebuchadnezzar—in his wars, perhaps, against Jehoiakim or Pharaoh-Necho—we get a curious glimpse. Alcæus greeted him on his return in a poem of which we possess a fragment, and which may be paraphrased thus:

From the ends of the earth thou art comeBack to thy home;The ivory hilt of thy bladeWith gold is embossed and inlaid;Since for Babylon's host a great deedThou didst work in their need,Slaying a warrior, an athlete of might,Royal, whose heightLacked of five cubits one span—A terrible man.

We can fancy with what delight and curiosity Alcæus, who, as may be gathered from his poems, was an amateur of armor, examined this sword-handle, wrought perhaps from Ethiopian tusks by Egyptian artists, with lotos-flowers or patterns of crocodiles, monkeys, and lions. This story of the polished Greek citizen's adventure among the Jews and Egyptians, known to us through Holy Writ, touches our imagination with the same strange sense of novelty as when we read of the Persian poet Sâdy, a slave in the camp of Richard Cœur de Lion's Crusaders.

Considering the life Alcæus led, it is not strange that he should have sung of arms and civic struggles. Many fragments, preserved in all probability from theStasiotica, or Songs of Sedition, which were very popular among the ancients, throw light upon the stormier passages of his history. One of these pieces[93]describes the poet's armory—his polished helmets and white horse-hair plumes, the burnished brazen greaves that hang upon the wall, the linen breastplates and bucklers thrown in heaps about the floor, with Chalkidian blades and girdles and tunics. The most striking point about this fragment is its foppery. Alcæus spares no pains to make us know how bright his armor is, how carefully his greaves are fixed against the wall by pegs you cannot see (πασσάλοις κρύπτοισι περικείμεναι), how carelessly the girdles and small gear are tossed about in sumptuous disarray. The poem seems to reveal a luxurious nature delighting in military millinery. No Dorian would have described his weapons from this point of view, but would have rather told us how often they had been used with effect in the field. The Æoliancharacter is here tempered with Orientalism.

Of the erotic poems of Alcæus, only a very few and inconsiderable fragments have survived. Horace says of them, addressing his lyre:

Lesbio primum modulate civi,Qui ferox bello, tamen inter arma,Sive jactatam religârat udoLittore navim,Liberum et Musas Veneremque et illiSemper hærentem puerum canebat;Et Lycum nigris oculis nigroqueCrine decorum.[94]

Of Lycus we only know, on the authority of Cicero,[95]that he had a wart upon the finger, which Alcæus praised in one of his poems. It has also been conjectured that the line οἶνος, ὦ φίλε παί, καὶ ἀλάθεα—"wine, dear boy, and truth"—which Theocritus quotes as a proverb at the beginning of his Æolic Idyl, was addressed to Lycus. A fragment of far greater interest is the couplet preserved by Hephæstion,[96]in which Alcæus calls on Sappho by her name: "Violet-crowned, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho! I want to say something, but shame prevents me."To this declaration Sappho replied: "If thy wishes were fair and noble, and thy tongue designed not to utter what is base, shame would not cloud thine eyes, but thou wouldst speak thy just desires." This is all we know about the love-passages between the greatest lyrists of the Æolian school. In this way do the ancient critics tantalize us. Aristotle,[97]in order to illustrate a moral proposition, Hephæstion, with a view to proving a metrical rule, fling these scraps of their wealth forth, little dreaming that after twenty centuries the men of new nations and other thoughts will eagerly collect the scraps, and long for more of that which might have been so freely lavished. Whether Sappho wrote her reply in maidenly modesty because the advances of Alcæus were really dishonorable, or whether she affected indignation to conceal a personal dislike for the poet, we cannot say. Aristotle or Hephæstion might, probably, have been able to tell us. But the one was only thinking of the signs of shame, while the attention of the other was riveted upon the "so-calleddodecasyllable Alcaic."

The most considerable remains of the lyrics of Alcæus are drinking-songs—praises of wine, combined with reflections upon life and appropriate descriptions of the different seasons. No time was amiss for drinking, to his mind: the heat of summer, the cold of winter, the blazing dog-star and the driving tempest, twilight with its cheerful gleam of lamps, mid-day with its sunshine—all suggest reasons for indulging in the cup. Not that we are justified in fancying Alcæus to have been a vulgar toper: he retained Æolian sumptuousness in his pleasures, and raised the art of drinking to an æsthetic altitude. One well-known piece from theParœniaof Alcæus is capable of translation into Elizabethan rhymed verse as follows:

The rain of Zeus descends, and from high heavenA storm is driven:And on the running water-brooks the coldLays icy hold:Then up! beat down the winter; make the fireBlaze high and higher;Mix wine as sweet as honey of the beeAbundantly;Then drink with comfortable wool aroundYour temples bound.We must not yield our hearts to woe, or wearWith wasting care;For grief will profit us no whit, my friend,Nor nothing mend:But this is our best medicine, with wine fraughtTo cast out thought.

The debt of Horace to Alcæus must have been immense. The fragment just translated is the original of the ninth ode of the first book. The fragment on the death of Myrsilus, νῦν χρὴ μεθύσθην, shows where Horace found the model for the last ode of the first book. Again, "O navis referent" (Hor.,Carm., i. 14) is based on an ode of the Lesbian poet of which we possess a fragment.[98]Between the temperaments of Horace and of Alcæus, as between those of Catullus and of Sappho, there were marked similarities and correspondences. The poetry of both Horace and Alcæus was polished rather than profound, admirably sketched rather than richly colored, more graceful than intense, less passionate than reflective. In Sappho and Catullus, on the other hand, we meet with richer and more ardent natures: they are endowed with keener sensibilities, with a sensuality more noble because of its intensity, with emotions more profound, with a deeper faculty of thought, that never loses itself in the shallows of "Stoic-Epicurean acceptance," but simply and exquisitely apprehends the facts of human life. Where Horace talks of Orcusand the Urn, Catullus sings:

Soles occidere et redire possunt,Nobis cum semel occidit brevis luxNox est perpetua una dormienda.

This contrast between the polished sententiousness of Horace and the pathetic outcry of Catullus marks the difference between two classes of poets to whom Horace and Alcæus, Sappho and Catullus, respectively belong.

Of the other Lesbian poets, Erinna and Damophila, we know but little: the one survives in a single epigram—if we reject the epitaphs on Baucis; the other is a mere name. It is noticeable that of the four Lesbian poets three are women. We may remember that in Thebes, which was also an Æolian city, Myrtis and Corinna rivalled Pindar.

To the list of Æolian poets, Anacreon, though an Ionian by birth and an Ionian in temperament, is generally added, because he cultivated the lyrical stanza of personal emotion. Into the Æolian style Anacreon introduced a new and uncongenial element. His passion had none of Sappho's fiery splendor, none of the haughtiness and restlessness which distinguished Alcæus. There was a vein of levity, almost of vulgarity, in the Ionians, which removed them from the altitudes of Dorian heroism and Æolian enthusiasm. This tincture of flippancy is discernible in Anacreon. Life and love come easily to him. The roses keep no secrets for his ears, such as they told to Sappho: they serve very well for garlands when he drinks, and have a pleasant smell, especially in myrrh. The wine-cup does not suggest to him variety of seasons—the frozen streams of winter, the parched breath of the dog-star—as with Alcæus: he tipples and gets drunk. His loves, too, are facile—neither permanent nor tempestuous. The girls and boys of whom he sings were flute-players and cupbearers, servants of a tyrant,instrumenta libidinis, chosen fortheir looks, as the poet had been selected for the sweetness of his lyre with twenty chords. He never felt the furnace of Sappho, whose love, however criminal in the estimation of modern moralists, was serious and of the soul. The difference between the lives of these three lyrists is very striking. Alcæus was a politician and party leader. Sappho was the centre of a free society of female poets. Anacreon was the courtier and laureate of tyrants. He won his first fame with Polycrates, at whose death Hipparchus fetched him to Athens in a trireme of fifty oars. Between Bacchus and Venus he spent his days in palaces; and died at the ripe age of eighty-five at Teos, choked, it is reported, by a grape-stone—a hoary-headedroué, for whom the rhyme of the mediæval Arcipoeta might have been written:

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