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LITERATURE PRIMER, edited 
 
 by John Richard Green, M. A. 
 GREEK. 
 
SftttratttM primers. 
 
 Edited by John Richard Green, M.A. 
 
 GREEK 
 
 LITERATURE 
 
 R. C. J EBB, M.A. 
 
 PROFESSOR OF GREEK IN THE UNIVERSITY OF GLASGOW. 
 
 UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA 
 
 AT CHAPEL HILL 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 
 D. APPLETON AND COMPANY, 
 i, 3, and 5 BOND STREET. 
 
 1884. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 PART I. THE EARLY LITERATURE: 
 
 TO 475 B.C. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 Introduction. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 Epic Poetry. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Elegiac and Iambic Poetry. Lyric Poetry. 
 
 PART II. THE ATTIC LITERATURE: 
 
 475— 3°° B - c - 
 CHAPTER I. 
 The Drama. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 The Beginnings of Prose. History. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 Oratory. Philosophical Prose. 
 
 PART III. THE LITERATURE OF 
 THE DECADENCE: 
 
 300 B.C. — 529 A.D. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 From Alexander to Augustus : 300—30 is.c 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 From Augustus to Justinian: 30 b.c. — 529 a.d. 
 
PRIMER 
 
 OF 
 
 GREEK LITERATURE. 
 
 PART I. THE EARLY LITERATURE. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 i. A Primer of Greek Literature should aim at 
 being useful, not only to students of Greek, but also to 
 those who do not know Greek, and who will never 
 read a Greek book except in a translation. The civi- 
 lised world is agreed in holding the great literature of 
 old Greece to be one of the most precious things 
 that have come down from the past, and all educated 
 people, whether they know Greek or not, may natur- 
 ally wish to know something about the contents of 
 Greek literature. This sketch is intended to serve as 
 a framework into which those who read any of the 
 Greek books, whether in the original or in English, 
 may fit what they read. The unity of Greek Litera- 
 ture is not the unity of a library but the unity of a 
 living body. In this, more perhaps than in any other 
 literature, we shall fail really to understand any one 
 part unless we see clearly what it has to do with the 
 rest. But first — Can we point to any broad character- 
 istics which at once give Greek literature a worth and 
 interest of its own for modern life ? 
 
6 GREEK LITERATURE. [part i. 
 
 2. The rational energy of the Greeks. 
 — The Greeks were not the first people who found 
 out how to till the earth well, or to fashion metals, 
 or to grow rich by war or commerce, or to build 
 splendid houses and temples. But they were the first 
 people who tried to make reason the guide of their 
 social life. One proof of this is found in the very 
 existence of the Greek cities. While other men were 
 living in tribes or under despotic kings, the Greeks 
 had already gathered themselves together in cities, — 
 societies ruled, not by force, but by the persuasions 
 of equal law. Another proof of it is found in the 
 Greek books. There we find writers of all sorts, poets 
 and historians and philosophers, habitually striving 
 to get at the reasons of things. On this side, Greek 
 literature has an interest such as belongs to no other 
 literature. It shows us how men first set about sys- 
 tematic thinking. It shows us how some questions 
 which have been solved since, and others which are 
 being discussed still, appeared to the people who first 
 seriously tried to answer them. 
 
 3. The bearing of Greek thought on modern 
 life. — But the Greek books are not merely interesting 
 as showing the methods and aims of early thinkers. 
 They contain results, too, which have had the deepest 
 and widest influence on the whole of modern life, in 
 religion, in morality, in science, in politics, in litera- 
 ture. The thoughts of the great Greek thinkers have 
 been bearing fruit in the world ever since they were 
 first uttered. In some special sciences, the work 
 done by the Greeks remains a basis of study to this 
 day, as in Ethics and in Logic and in Geometry. It 
 is in Greek historians and Greek orators that we read 
 some of the political lessons most directly useful for 
 our own time. Neither the history of Christian doc- 
 trine, nor the outer history of the Christian Church, 
 can be fully understood without reference to the 
 character and work of the Greek mind. Under the 
 
chap. I.] INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 influence of Christianity, two principal elements have 
 entered into the spiritual life of the modern world : 
 one of these has been Hebrew ; the other has been 
 Greek. 
 
 4. Originality of Greek Literature. — The 
 chief types of poetry, such as the epic, lyric, dramatic, 
 — the chief types of prose, such as the historical, philo- 
 sophical, oratorical — are so much a matter of course 
 now that we are apt to think of them as existing in 
 the nature of things. But some of them did not exist 
 at all, and others existed only in rude germs, when 
 the Greek genius began its work. One after another, 
 as the need of expression in each kind was felt, each of 
 these types was perfected by the creative force of that 
 Greek genius. In Greek literature, then, we have not 
 merely a literature very interesting in itself : we have 
 the fountain-head of all Western literature. The in- 
 fluence of Rome on modern literature has in some 
 cases been more direct than that of Greece. But if 
 the influence is tracked to its spring, any broad stream 
 of it will carry us back to a Greek source. 
 
 5. Form. — The Greeks were a physically beautiful 
 race, with great quickness and fineness of perception, 
 which made them feel at once when anything was 
 exaggerated or absurd, or, as we say, in bad taste. 
 One of their favourite maxims was, 'Do nothing too 
 much.' They were naturally obedient in all things to a 
 sense of fitness and measure, — what they called kairos, 
 a word which means literally ' precision,' the instinct 
 of drawing the line, as it were, at the right place. So 
 when they built a temple, this instinct kept them from 
 making one part of it too large in proportion to 
 another, or from adding ornament in the wrong 
 place : and this is the reason why such a building as 
 the Parthenon at Athens, with its noble simplicity and 
 symmetry, is so perfect of its kind. Or if a Greek 
 made a statue, not only did he make the limbs and 
 features on just the right scale for each other, but he 
 
8 GREEK LITERA TURE. [part i. 
 
 refrained from trying to make the stone express more 
 than it fitly could, or do duty for a picture. In the 
 same way, when they wrote books, the Greeks were 
 guided by their sense of fitness. They felt that it was 
 out of proportion, and therefore ugly, if the words 
 were grander or rarer than the thoughts, and that a 
 style which might be fitting in one kind of composi- 
 tion would be out of place in another. Above all. 
 the Greeks felt that a writer ought to be char, and 
 that any elaborate putting together of words which 
 does not make the thought clear is worse even than 
 misplaced finery. So, in the best work of Greek 
 writers, we generally find these two things. First, 
 the style is of the right kind for the subject; in 
 poetry, for instance, the epic style is kept distinct 
 from the lyric ; historical prose is not written like 
 oratory. Secondly, the writer tries to be clear. He 
 chooses the words for the thoughts, he does not en- 
 slave the thoughts to the words. 
 
 6. Greek Literature and the Study of Lan- 
 guage. — The Greeks excelled, as we have seen, in 
 an instinct for beauty, and in the power of creating 
 beautiful forms : and, of all the beautiful things which 
 they created, their own language was the first and the 
 most wonderful. The Greek mind was very bright 
 and keen, and was accustomed to feeling fine dis- 
 tinctions and light shades of meaning. And so the 
 Greeks gradually moulded their language so that it 
 could express these fine distinctions and light shades 
 by very simple means, and yet with perfect accuracy. 
 By using one turn of phrase instead of another which 
 would have been equally correct, or with the help of 
 those little words called ' particles ' which answered 
 to the play of feature or tone of voice in talking, or 
 even by a slight change in the order of the sentence, 
 a Greek could mark with delicate precision the mean- 
 ing which he meant to convey. This peculiar power 
 which the language acquired of being easily bent into 
 
chap, i.] INTRODUCTION. Q 
 
 the exact shape of the thought entitles Greek to be 
 called the most flexible of languages. Grammars give 
 classified examples of this flexibility. But as the fields 
 are better for a botanist than the best collection of 
 dried flowers, so we must go to the Greek books if 
 we would see the language in the fulness of its elastic 
 life. No one who is a stranger to Greek literature 
 has seen how perfect an instrument it is possible for 
 human speech to be. 
 
 7. General Course of Greek Literature. — 
 Greek has lived on from the days before Homer 
 into our own, one and the same language always, in 
 spite of small changes, — still giving new proofs of 
 its flexibility in the ease with which it finds terse ex- 
 pression for modern ideas. And this undying lan- 
 guage has never ceased to have a literature ; a rude 
 and scanty literature, indeed, it was during one part 
 of its modern course, yet even then lit up now and 
 again by the enthusiasm of Greek scholars for the 
 old Greek genius. This long and still vigorous life 
 has had three great stages : — 1. The Old Literature, 
 from Homer to 529 a.d., when the Schools of heathen 
 Philosophy were closed by the edict of the Emperor 
 Justinian : 2. The Middle or Byzantine Literature, 
 from 529 a.d. to the capture of Constantinople by the 
 Turks (1453 a.d.): 3. The Modern Literature, of 
 which the first beginning may be taken from the 
 satirical poetry, in the popular dialect, of the monk 
 Theodorus Prodromus (1143 — 1180 a.d.) in the reign 
 of the Emperor Manuel Comnenus. At the end of 
 the last century, the Greek patriot and scholar Koraes 
 helped, by his example, to purify the literary dialect 
 from many corrupt forms and foreign words. 
 
 8. The Old Literature. — We have to do here 
 with the Old Literature only. It may be sub-divided 
 into the Early Literature; the Attic Literature; and 
 the Literature of the Decadence. 
 
 I. The Early literature begins with Homer 
 
io GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 and extends down to about 475 B.C. Epic poetry 
 flourishes. Elegiac, Iambic and Lyric Poetry arise. 
 Prose writing, though in a rude form, begins among 
 the Ionian Greeks of Asia Minor. 
 
 II. The Attic Literature flourishes from about 
 475 to 300 B.C. Dramatic Poetry reaches its perfec- 
 tion at Athens, both in Tragedy and in Comedy : and 
 the Athenians also perfect a Prose Literature in his- 
 tory, oratory, and philosophical dialogue. The Greek 
 genius has now finished its work of creating beautiful 
 forms : and it has now lost the mainspring of its old 
 energy, political freedom. We pass from the age of 
 creative art in verse and prose to the age of learned 
 work in letters and science. 
 
 III. The Literature of the Decadence has 
 two chief periods. 
 
 I. The Alexandrian period, from 300 B.C. till 
 Greece became subject to Rome in 146 B.C. 
 
 II. The Graeco-Roman period, from 146 B.C. till 
 the Schools of heathen Philosophy were closed in 
 529 A.D. 
 
 9. Natural Growth of Greek Literature. — 
 The great literature of Greece was not artificial, but 
 grew naturally out of Greek life. As the year brings 
 violets before roses and ripens one fruit earlier than 
 another, so the golden time of the Greek genius has its 
 seasons, in which first one sort of growth, and then 
 another, blossoms, flowers and fades. A literature 
 which copies foreign models may begin with any kind 
 of verse or prose, and may have several different kinds 
 in vigour at once. But the Greeks had no models. 
 They invented the styles of poetry and prose which 
 they perfected, one after another. The process of 
 invention went step by step with the development of 
 their mental and social life. Each great branch of 
 the Greek race, as its natural turn came, did that 
 special part in the work which it was fittest to do. 
 
 10. The three great branches were the Aeolian, 
 
chap. I.] INTRODUCTION. II 
 
 the Dorian and the Ionian. At the time when literary 
 history begins, the chief seats of the Aeolians were 
 Thessaly, Boeotia, Aetolia, and Acarnania; in the 
 Peloponnesus, Arcadia, Elis and Achaia; the N.W. 
 coasts of Asia Minor, and the island of Lesbos; and 
 great colonies, such as Croton, in Magna Graecia on 
 the S.E. coast of Italy. The Dorians held Argolis, 
 Messenia and Laconia in the Peloponnesus; Corinth 
 and Megara; settlements on the S.W. coasts of Asia 
 Minor; the islands of Crete and Rhodes; Syracuse 
 and other colonies on the E. and S. coasts of Sicily; 
 Tarentum and other colonies in Magna Graecia. The 
 Attic part of the Ionian stock possessed Attica and 
 Euboea; Ionians were settled on the W. coast of 
 Asia Minor, between the Aeolians on the north and 
 the Dorians on the south; in the islands of Samos 
 and Chios, and in most of the Aegean islets; and in 
 widely spread colonies, including cities in Italy, Sicily, 
 and on the Euxine. 
 
 ii. Each of these three branches used its own 
 modification of the Greek language, and this modifi- 
 cation was called its dialect. The Aeolic dialect, 
 suited to a quick, tripping utterance, was truer than 
 any other to the oldest forms of the language ; but it 
 always remained comparatively poor and rude for 
 literary purposes ; and even the Aeolic of Lesbos, 
 where the dialect had been cultivated in poetry, 
 could be described by Athenians of Plato's time as 
 'a barbarian idiom.' Greek is distinguished among 
 Indo-European languages by the completeness and 
 nicety of its vowel-system ; and one main distinction 
 between the Greek dialects consisted in their treat- 
 ment of the vowels. In Aeolic, the o and u sounds 
 prevailed. The Doric dialect best preserved the 
 oldest sounds of the language ; it was a highland 
 dialect, the terse and sinewy speech of a steadfast 
 race, whose grave earnestness was joined to a certain 
 dry humour. In Doric, the broad a sound prevailed. 
 2 
 
12 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 The Ionic dialect was the smooth, harmonious 
 language of an ease-loving people, gifted with bright 
 and versatile intelligence, educated to the contempla- 
 tive enjoyment of natural beauty by the climate and 
 scenery of the Aegean coasts and islands, and fami- 
 liarised with elegant luxury by intercourse with Asiatics 
 and Phoenicians. It was characterised by dislike of 
 all rough combinations, by partiality for the liquid 
 meeting of vowels, and especially by love of the soft 
 e sound. 
 
 12. The Attic dialect was a modified form of 
 the Ionic, representing a happy medium between the 
 too enervated Ionic and the somewhat harsh Doric 
 In its mature phase, it was the artistic creation of 
 Attic Tragedy, influenced both by the epic language 
 of the Homeric poems and by the choral poetry of 
 the Dorians. Between 475 and 300 B.C. Attic became 
 established as the standard dialect of Greek literature. 
 But the separate life of the Greek cities, the physical 
 partition of Greece Proper by mountain-barriers and 
 far-reaching arms of the sea, and the variety of climate 
 both in Greece and in the scattered Greek settlements, 
 favoured the preservation of the dialects down to late 
 times. All the dialects were successively brought 
 into play by the literary development. 
 
 13. First, the Ionians in the colonies of Asia 
 Minor, — with their keen feeling for grace of form, 
 their genial sympathy with everything bright and 
 joyous in nature, their delight in adventure, and their 
 pliant, musical language, so well fitted for fluent, 
 eager narrative, — wove the warlike stories of heroes 
 and gods into Epic Poetry. Theirs, too, was Elegiac 
 Poetry, the first slight deviation from the Epic. Then 
 the Aeolians of Lesbos, proud, chivalrous, imagina- 
 tive, sensuous, brought forth the Lyric Song of personal 
 passion in war or love, with that union of fiery 
 strength and tenderness which marked the Aeolic 
 speech. The Dorians of the Peloponnesus and of 
 
chap. I.] INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 the colonies in Sicily and Southern Italy created the 
 Choral Lyric Poetry, to be used at the festivals of 
 cities or princes, or in the worship of the gods : 
 poetry in which the simple and earnest religious faith 
 of the Dorians, their intensely conservative pride in 
 the traditions and institutions of the Dorian State, and 
 their love for the usages of Dorian home-life, were 
 uttered in the broad, massive harmonies of the Dorian 
 speech. Lastly, the most gifted branch of the Ionians, 
 the Attic people, with their happy balance of quali- 
 ties, blended together elements of all the earlier kinds 
 in the most complex and artistic form of all, the 
 Drama ; and, as the Greek mind and culture reached 
 their full ripeness, raised Greek Prose from its rude 
 beginnings in Ionia to the varied forms of a mature 
 Prose Literature. The Attic work, both in verse and 
 prose, had a universal stamp ? it came from the centre 
 of the Greek spirit, and appealed to all the Greeks. 
 
 14. In the earlier poetry and prose, the dialect 
 employed is determined chiefly by the species 
 of the composition, rather than by the birthplace 
 of the composer. The epic poets of Ionia gradually 
 formed a diction of their own, Ionic in its general 
 character, but not such Ionic as was commonly 
 spoken. This epic language of Ionia came to be 
 borrowed more or less by all poets, whether Ionian 
 by birth or not, who put tales about heroes into verse. 
 Thus it is used, though with some alloy from their 
 native dialects, by the Aeolian epic poet Hesiod and 
 by the Dorian elegiac poet Theognis. And, since 
 this Ionian epic dialect had thus established itself as 
 the proper dialect for story, it was used by the earliest 
 writers, philosophers or historians, who set forth their 
 thoughts in prose; as by the historian Herodotus, the 
 native of a Dorian city. The pure Ionic dialect 
 was that in which Iambic poetry was first composed; 
 and hence we find some pure Ionic forms retained in 
 the iambic verse of Attic Tragedy. The Doric 
 
14 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 dialect, again, belonged especially to Choral Lyric 
 poetry ; it is therefore blended with the epic idiom, 
 and with his own Aeolic, by Pindar; and it enters 
 into the choral songs of Attic Tragedy. Aeolic was 
 the chosen dialect of love-songs, and it is used for 
 this strain by the Dorian poet Theocritus. A poet 
 could vary his dialect to suit different kinds of com- 
 position. Theocritus wrote his pastoral poems in 
 Doric; the Attic Tyrtaeus used the Ionian epic dialect 
 for his elegies, but wove Doric forms into his march- 
 ing-songs. Thus, by a division of labour among the 
 dialects, the literature gradually brought out 
 all the faculties of the language, giving free 
 play to each in the way that nature seemed to have 
 marked out for it. 
 
 15. The art of writing. — There can be no 
 literature, in any proper sertse of the word, without 
 writing. For literature implies fixed form : and, 
 though memory may do great feats, a merely oral 
 tradition cannot guarantee fixed form. The Greeks 
 got their alphabet from the Phoenicians, and at first 
 called the letters ' Phoenician signs.' Now the Greeks 
 had dealings with Phoenician merchants while Sidon 
 was still a great commercial and naval power, — at 
 least as early as 1100 B.C., probably earlier. It seems 
 unlikely that the Greeks, with their bright wits, their 
 quickness in taking hints, and their love of story, 
 should have allowed many centuries to go by before 
 they caught up this art of writing from the Phoenicians, 
 whose shrewdness they keenly appreciated, whose 
 fabrics and works in metal they prized so much, and 
 who were their rivals in trade. The historian He- 
 rodotus, about 440 B.C., assumes as a matter of 
 course that the art of writing had been perfectly 
 familiar to the Greeks for many centuries before his 
 time. Herodotus was not a critical antiquarian ; but 
 he knew Greek life, he had studied its records, he 
 was an accomplished man and a great traveller : and 
 
chap. I.] INTRODUCTION. 15 
 
 he would scarcely have taken the very old use of 
 writing for granted, as he everywhere does, if this was 
 not, at least, the general belief of well-informed 
 Greeks in his time. Extant evidence makes it pro- 
 bable that the Greeks knew the art of writing before 
 the forms of the language had been fixed as we find 
 them in the oldest literature. We have, however, no 
 definite allusion to, or example of, writing in Greece 
 that can be put earlier than about 700 B.C. 
 
 16. It was only very slowly that a reading public 
 came into existence. Priests and poets were the first 
 who made much use of the art of writing. The temple 
 at Delphi was probably one of its earliest centres. At 
 Athens, in the time of the Peloponnesian War (431 — 
 404 B.C.), there were book-shops in the market-place 
 (the quarter was called the 'book-mart'), and there 
 was an export trade in books. As the manuscripts 
 were copied by slaves, whose labour cost little, these 
 written rolls were tolerably cheap. The temples, and 
 a few students or great men, possessed large collec- 
 tions of volumes'. But the first public library of 
 
 1 Among the oldest Greek manuscripts now extant are some 
 Egyptian papyri, part of them as old perhaps as 160 B.C., in- 
 cluding fragments of Homer's Iliad and of the orator Hype- 
 reides, and some rolls from Heiculaneum (a town which was 
 destroyed in 79 A.D.), containing writings of the Epicurean phi- 
 losopher Philodemus, a contemporary of Cicero. A parchment 
 at Milan, with fragments of the Iliad, is of the 4th or 5th cen- 
 tury A. r>. The 'Sinaitic' ms. of the New Testament is of the 
 5U1 century or earlier: the Vatican ms. is of the 4th. With 
 these and one or two more exceptions, we have no Greek manu- 
 script older than the 9th century A. D. A few of the best, such a ; 
 the Venice ms. of the Iliad and the Paris ms. of Demosthenes, 
 belong to the 10th century ; or, as the Florentine ms. of Aeschylus 
 and Sophocles, and the Ravenna ms. of Aristophanes, to the 
 nth century. From the 12th century onwards the mss. are more 
 abundant. The first book printed in Greek type was the Greek 
 grammar of Constantine Lascaris (Milan, 1476): the first Greek 
 author, Aesop's Fables(Milan, 1479). Homer's Iliad and Odyssey 
 were first printed at Florence in 1488. By 1550 most of the Greek 
 classics had been printed, chiefly by the Aldi at Venice, Junta 
 at Florence, and Stephanus at Paris. 
 
1 6 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 Greek books was that founded by Ptolemy I. (306 — 
 285 B.C.) at Alexandria. 
 
 17. The Greek Poetry before Homer — 
 at first religious. — Greek literature begins, for 
 us, with the two Homeric poems, the Iliad and the 
 Odyssey. But these are not at all like the simple 
 ballad-poetry of other countries. They are works of 
 highly finished art, which could not possibly have 
 been produced until the poetical art had been prac- 
 tised for a long time. We have no remains, however, 
 of Greek poetry before Homer. We can only make 
 out some of the general forms that it must have 
 taken. It is as if English literature began suddenly 
 in the fourteenth century with Chaucer, and nothing 
 was known of Beowulf or Csedmon or the old re- 
 ligious poetry except from a few bare names. The 
 most certain fact about the earliest Greek poetry is 
 that it was closely connected with Greek religion. 
 
 18. There was a time when our far-off ancestors, 
 the forefathers of Persians and Hindoos, Greeks and 
 Italians, Celts and Teutons and Slavs, lived together 
 in Central Asia, and worshipped the visible agencies 
 or forms of Nature, such as the Sun, the Dawn, the 
 Earth. Then they came to think of these powers as 
 persons, with human bodies and minds. The Sun 
 became a god who drives his fiery chariot through 
 the heavens; the Dawn, a goddess who lays a rosy 
 finger on the gloom; Earth came to be called the 
 Mother of the gods. But this change did not come 
 all at once. There was a time when they had begun 
 to speak of the natural powers as persons, and yet 
 had not forgotten that they were really natural powers, 
 and that the personal names were merely signs. There 
 are traces of this phase in the Vedas, or sacred 
 Hymns of the Indian Brahmans, which are older than 
 the Homeric poems, and nearer to the spirit of the 
 ancient religion as it existed before Greeks and In- 
 dians had parted from the common stock in Central 
 
chap. I.] INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 Asia. We have a trace of the same stage, probably, 
 in some old Greek songs, hardly known to us save by 
 name — such as the song of Linus, of Ialemus, oiHylas. 
 Such songs were usually laments for a beautiful youth, 
 who had met with a violent death. Linus (the 
 Argives said) was a boy sprung from gods, who grew 
 up among the sheep-folds, and whom dogs tore to 
 pieces. Thus men mourned the young loveliness of 
 spring, slain by the fierce dog-star Sirius. 
 
 19. Hymns to the gods. — The Greeks were 
 distinguished by their sense of beautiful form, and 
 especially of beauty in the human form. When they 
 had parted from their kinsmen in Asia, they gradually 
 defined their gods in the clear image of beautiful men 
 and women. They could not have rested content 
 with the shadowy or monstrous shapes of the Indian 
 deities. And they said that these gods or goddesses 
 in human form lived on the top of Mount Olympus, 
 a high mountain with snowy peaks in the north of 
 Thessaly. Bards made Hymns in honour of one or 
 another deity, weaving into them, probably, old alle- 
 gories or mystic lore which the Greeks had brought 
 with them from Asia. One of the deities thus 
 honoured was Apollo, the god of brightness and 
 purity, the lord of music, the giver of prophecy, and the 
 healer. To him especially men sang paeans or Songs of 
 Health, when they asked him to help them, or praised 
 him for help given. Another was Demeter, Earth 
 the Mother, the giver of grain; the hymns to her 
 praised her bounty, or spoke of her sorrow as she 
 sought her daughter Persephone who had been taken 
 to the dark underworld, or her joy when she found 
 her again. Dionysus was the god of wine, of frolic 
 and revelry, and of every physical rapture which 
 lifts up the spirit of man. Both Dionysus and 
 Demeter were also associated, in the mystic doc- 
 trine, with the idea of a life after death. Cybele 
 was the name given by the Phrygians of Asia Minor 
 
i8 • GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 to the 'Mother of the gods;' she was worshipped, 
 with clashing of cymbals and the music of the flute, 
 and wild dances, by priests called Corybantes. 
 
 20. Legendary bards. — The earliest poet, in 
 Greek legend, is Orpheus. The name of this 
 mythical person is the Greek form of the Indian 
 Ribhu. The Ribhus figure in the Indian hymns as 
 great artificers, the first mortals who were raised to 
 the gods. Orpheus, like other early bards, is called 
 Thracian. This means that he was connected with 
 the worship of the Muses, goddesses who preside 
 over poetry. Their worship was imparted by a people 
 called Thracians to the Greeks in Pieria, a district on 
 the N.E. border of Thessaly, whence it spread south- 
 ward to Parnassus in Phocis and Helicon in Boeotia. 
 From early times the Greeks connected Orpheus with 
 mystic teaching about the origin of the world and 
 the immortality of the soul, and associated him with 
 the worship of the god Dionysus in the underworld. 
 Musaeus (' servant of the Muses '), also ' Thracian,' 
 and sometimes called a disciple of Orpheus, is 
 especially connected with the mystic worship of 
 Demeter at Eleusis in Attica. This worship was said 
 to have been founded by the 'Thracian' Eumolpus 
 ('the good chanter'), whom the priestly family of the 
 Eumolpidae claimed as their ancestor. The bard 
 Thamyras is another of the Thracian group. 
 
 21. The first hymns to Apollo were said to have 
 been made by Olen, a Lycian, Chrysothemis, a 
 Cretan, and Philammon, of Delphi. Then we hear 
 also of Phrygian or Cretan bards who made hymns to 
 Cybele, such as Olympus the pupil of Marsyas (a 
 demi-god, said to have been vanquished by Apollo in 
 a musical contest), and Hyagnis. The age of this 
 earliest sacred poetry must have followed close on the 
 migration of the Greeks from the old common home 
 in Asia. When these early hymns were made, some 
 of the Greeks were still on their way through Thrace 
 
chap. I.] EPIC POETRY. 19 
 
 and Macedonia, others were settling in the Aegean 
 islands, others were still in Asia. And so we have 
 three main streams of this early poetry, the 'Thra- 
 cian' or Northern, the Phrygian, and the Cretan. 
 22. The marriage-hymn. The dirge. — The 
 Homeric Iliad mentions the joyous marriage-hymn, 
 sung as the bridegroom brings the bride home; and 
 the dirge or threnus for the dead. Now in ancient 
 India both of these were chanted by the priest as 
 part of a solemn ritual. And so it must once have 
 been with the Greeks. But, when the Iliad was com- 
 posed, both marriage-song and dirge had acquired a 
 free, popular form. Here we see the early tendency 
 of the Greeks to divest song of its character as 
 part of a liturgy, and to make it secular, the 
 work of the lay artist, for all the people. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 EPIC POETRY. 
 
 The Homeric Iliad and Odyssey, 940 — 850 B.C. The Cyclic 
 Poets, 776—550 B.C. Hesiod, 850 — 800 B.C. The Homeric 
 Hymns, 776—500 B.C. 
 
 i. Songs of warriors. The minstrel. — 
 
 By the side of the sacred hymns, there must very 
 early have sprung up songs of warriors and brave 
 deeds in war. The Iliad makes the heroes at Troy 
 sing such songs, and the Iliad and Odyssey them- 
 selves are built up from very old songs of this kind. 
 The Odyssey gives us a lively picture of the minstrel 
 (aoidos) by whom such songs were sung in the halls of 
 princes. A king is going to make a great feast, and 
 bids his herald, the chamberlain of his court, to invite 
 'the god-like singer; for to him the god has given 
 
20 GREEK LITERATURE. [par* I. 
 
 song abundantly, to gladden us.' So the chamberlain 
 brings ' the welcome minstrel, whom the Muse loved 
 exceedingly, and to whom she gave both evil and 
 good ; she took away his eyesight, but she gave him 
 sweet song ' ; he sets a chair for the minstrel, studded 
 with silver nails, in the midst of the feasters, firm 
 against a tall pillar, and hangs a clear-toned harp on £ 
 peg just above his head, and guides the blind man's 
 hands to touch it : then he puts a table beside him, 
 with food and wine. When the banquet is over, the 
 minstrel sings to his harp ' the glories of men '. Such 
 a minstrel was not looked upon simply as an artist ; 
 he was thought to be inspired by the gods. And so, 
 naturally, he had a sacred character. When King 
 Agamemnon was going away to the war at Troy (the 
 story said) he charged the minstrel of his house to 
 watch over the honour of the queen Clytaemnestra : 
 and at first the wicked Aegisthus was baffled, ' for 
 the lady was discreet; and, besides, the minstrel was 
 present.' 
 
 2. Epic Poetry. — These songs, sung to the 
 harp by minstrels, were the beginnings out of which 
 Epic Poetry was slowly shaped by a long series of 
 poets. ' Epic ' is from the Greek epos, ' a saying ' or 
 'word,' — connected, through its root vep, with the 
 Latin vox, ' voice,' and with the vi of ' invite.' Epos 
 came to be used especially of an oracle, since a god's 
 answer was the most important sort of ' saying.' Then, 
 as oracles came to be given in verse, epos came to mean 
 ' a verse ' : and the plural, epe, ' verses,' could be used 
 either of poetry generally or of a single poem. Later, 
 when lyric songs set to music were called mele, ' things 
 sung,' all poems which were not accompanied by music, 
 but merely recited, were distinguished as epe, ' spoken 
 verses.' Now the chief kind of poetry which was thus 
 merely recited was, like the Homeric, narrative poetry 
 in hexameter verse. To this kind, therefore, the name 
 epe was especially given, and it came to be called 
 
chap. II.] EPIC POETRY. 21 
 
 Epic Poetry. Hexameter verse — called ' heroic ' 
 verse by the Greeks, because it was used in epic poetry 
 which tells of heroes — is known to English readers 
 from such poems as Longfellow's Evangeline, Kings- 
 ley's Andromeda, Clough's Bothie. According to 
 Aristotle, the story of an epic poem must be on a 
 great and noble theme : it must be one in itself; and 
 it must be complete, that is, it must have a regular 
 development from the beginning to the end. Epic 
 poetry is the only extant Greek poetry older than 
 about 700 B.C. In the later days of the literature 
 we meet with artificial or learned epics. But at 
 present we have to do with the early or original epic 
 poetry. This is represented by the Homeric Iliad 
 and Odyssey ; the fragments of the Cyclic Poets ; 
 the Poems of Hesiod ; and the Homeric Hymns. 
 
 3. The story of the Iliad. — The Iliad means 
 the Poem of /lion or Troy, a city of Mysia in the 
 north-west of Asia Minor. The subject of the poem 
 is one chapter of events in the ten years' siege of Troy 
 by the Greeks. Paris (also called Alexander), son of 
 Priam king of Troy, had carried off Helen, the fairest 
 of women, wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. Helen had 
 been wooed by many suitors, and her father Tyndareus 
 had bound them all by an oath to join in avenging that 
 man whom she should marry, if she were taken from 
 him by force. So Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, 
 called together these suitors and other chieftains 
 from all parts of Greece, and they sailed with many 
 ships to besiege Troy. For ten years they besieged 
 it in vain, though the Trojans dared not come out 
 and fight pitched battles; for there was a hero in 
 the Greek army so terrible that not even Hector, the 
 greatest of the Trojan warriors, could stand before 
 him. This hero was Achilles, whom the sea-goddess 
 Thetis had borne to Peleus, king of Phthiotis, in 
 Thessaly. But at last, in the tenth year of the siege, 
 Achilles suffered a grievous affront from the king 
 
 14* 
 
22 GREEK LITERATURE. [part i. 
 
 Agamemnon, who took away from him his prize, the 
 captive damsel Briseis. Then Achilles was angry and 
 said that he would fight for the Greeks no more, and 
 withdrew from the army to his tent by the sea shore. 
 
 4. This is the moment at which the Iliad begins. 
 'Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles.' The Wrath 
 of Achilles — what it did, and how at last it was 
 turned away — is the central subject of the Iliad. But 
 this subject is so treated as to make a general picture 
 of the whole siege during a few days of its tenth 
 and last year, when Troy was about to fall. The first 
 result of Achilles refusing to fight was that the Tro- 
 jans now dared to come forth and give battle to the 
 Greeks. The Iliad is in 24 books. The first 15 of 
 these are taken up with the story of the wavering 
 strife; how victory leaned now this way, now that; 
 how some Greek hero slew a Trojan hero hand to 
 hand, or a Trojan slew a Greek; how the gods and 
 goddesses themselves took this or that side in the 
 fray. But at last the Greeks are hard pressed. Then 
 Patroclus, the friend of Achilles, pleads with him: 'O 
 dreadful in thy prowess! What good will any one 
 have of thee in days to come, unless thou turn away 
 foul ruin from the Greeks?' Still Achilles will not fight. 
 But he lends his armour to Patroclus, so that his friend 
 may be taken for him, and allows him to lead forth 
 his followers, the Myrmidons. Patroclus is slain by 
 Hector. Then, at last, Achilles is roused. He rushes 
 to the field, drives the Trojans within their walls, and 
 slays Hector, the last hope of Troy, and drags his 
 body, tied to his chariot, back to the ships. The 
 Iliad ends with king Priam coming to ask the body 
 of his slain son from Achilles. 'I have borne,' the 
 old man says, 'what no one on the earth has ever 
 borne — to lift to my lips the hands of the man who has 
 slain my son.' Achilles grants his prayer, and there is 
 a truce while the people of Troy pay the last rites to 
 Hector. ~*~ — 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 23 
 
 5. The story of the Odyssey. — The Odyssey 
 means the Poem of Odysseus (or, as the Romans 
 called him, Ulysses), who was the king of the island 
 of Ithaca, and the cleverest of all the Greek princes 
 who fought against Troy. When Troy was taken, 
 Odysseus and his followers sailed for Ithaca. But on 
 their way they were driven to the land of the Cyclopes, a 
 savage race of one-eyed giants; and here Odysseus 
 put out the eye of the Cyclops Polyphemus, after 
 that monster had eaten six of the hero's comrades. 
 Now Poseidon, the god of the sea, was the father of 
 Polyphemus; and Poseidon, in revenge, doomed Odys- 
 seus to wander far and wide over the sea to strange 
 lands. When the Odyssey begins, it is ten years since the 
 fall of Troy, and Odysseus is still far away from home 
 in the island of Ogygia, at the centre of the sea. For 
 seven years the nymph Calypso ('Concealment'), who 
 loves him, has detained him there against his will. 
 -Meanwhile his wife Penelope, in Ithaca, has been 
 courted by more than a hundred suitors, lawless, 
 violent men, who feast riotously in the house of 
 Odysseus, as if it were their own. She tried to gain 
 time by pretending that she wished to finish a fine 
 winding-sheet, which she was weaving, before she made 
 her choice; and every night she took down what she 
 had woven by day. But when she had done thus for 
 three years, the suitors found out the trick, and be- 
 came more urgent than ever. And now Telemachus, 
 the son of Odysseus, is urged by the friendly goddess 
 Athene to go in search of his father to Pylus, in the 
 Peloponnesus, where he is entertained by king Nestor, 
 and then to Sparta, where he is the guest of king 
 Menelaus. 
 
 6. Here our story goes back to Odysseus. The god 
 Hermes tells Calypso from Zeus that she must let him 
 go, and she obeys. Odysseus sails from her island on 
 a sort of raft which he has made for himself. His old 
 enemy, the sea-god Poseidon, presently espies him, 
 
24 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 and wrecks his raft: but a sea-goddess, Ino, gives 
 him a magic scarf which buoys him up, and he comes 
 safe to the island of the Phaeacians, a rich and happy 
 people near to the gods and famous as seamen, whose 
 orchards bear fruit all the year round. The king 
 Alcinous entertains Odysseus, who relates all his 
 strange adventures; how (before he came to Calypsos 
 isle) he and his companions visited the isle of the en- 
 chantress Circe, who changed the others into swine, 
 while he himself was saved by a charmed herb called 
 moly, and persuaded her to restore his friends to the 
 human form; how they passed by the shore of the sweet- 
 singing Sirens, and between Scylla and Charybdis; 
 and how at last all his comrades perished because they 
 had slain the sacred oxen of the Sun-god. 
 
 7. Then a Phaeacian crew take Odysseus back to 
 Ithaca in a ship. His faithful swineherd Eumaeus 
 does not know him, for Athene has disguised him as 
 an old beggar-man; but his old dog Argus knows his 
 master, who has been twenty years away; he wags his 
 tail and drops his ears as the beggar-man comes near, 
 and dies. Meanwhile Telemachus comes back from 
 his search. Athene reveals his father to him, and 
 father and son arrange a plan of vengeance on the 
 suitors. Odysseus, still disguised, has an audience of 
 Penelope, pretending to bring news of her husband, but 
 narrowly escapes being discovered through his old nurse 
 Eurycleia recognising a scar as she is washing his feet. 
 Penelope, inspired by Athene, now says that she will 
 wed that suitor who can send an arrow from the bow 
 of the hero Eurytus — an heirloom in the house — 
 through the helve-holes of twelve pole-axes put one 
 behind another in the hall. Not one of the suitors 
 can even string the bow. But the disguised Odysseus 
 bends it easily, and sends an arrow clean through the 
 holes. This is the signal for the slaughter of the 
 suitors. Odysseus showers his arrows on them, and 
 finally, helped by Telemachus and two trusty servants, 
 
chap. II.] EPIC POETRY. 25 
 
 slays them all. Now at last he reveals himself to his 
 wife, and tells her the story of his journeys. The 
 24th book tells how the god Hermes led the shades 
 of the suitors beneath the earth; how Odysseus in 
 Ithaca was made known to his father Laertes ; how he 
 overcame the kinsfolk of the suitors who sought to 
 avenge them; and how he was reconciled to his people. 
 
 8. The two heroes. — Achilles and Odysseus 
 are two characters which always had a strong hold 
 upon the Greek imagination. The Greek idea of 
 human perfection was a wise mind in a beautiful 
 body, good counsel joined to noble action. Noble 
 action is preeminently represented by Achilles, good 
 counsel by Odysseus. Odysseus is brave, but he is 
 especially the man of subtle intellect and ready re- 
 source. It was a grave fault of the Greeks that 
 they cared too little whether that quickness of wit 
 which they so much admired was or was not honest. 
 It is not strange that the noble Homeric conception 
 of Odysseus should have been lowered by later Greek 
 poets, who, dwelling chiefly on his subtlety, some- 
 times made him an unscrupulous knave, reckless of 
 everything except personal gain. 
 
 No such shadow ever fell on the Homeric Achilles. 
 His irresistible might and splendour in war, his 
 stormy human passions, his fine sense, fitting in the 
 son of a goddess, for what is soothing or strengthen- 
 ing in the messages of the gods, his love passing the 
 love of women, his foresight of an early death, even 
 when life was most dazzling, made him glow before 
 the Greek imagination with an immortal youth, as the 
 very type of chivalry in their race. The early am- 
 bitions of Alexander the Great were fired by this 
 Homeric vision of Achilles. Nothing can show better 
 how vividly the Homeric Poems wrought in Greek life 
 and history than to see how real the young Greek 
 hero at Troy was to the young Greek conqueror of 
 the East. 
 
26 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 9. Homeric Theology. — The Odyssey bears 
 the marks of a later time than the Iliad. Still, there 
 is a general agreement between the two poems in 
 the broad features of the age which they describe. 
 Each poem is a picture of an heroic age on which the 
 poet looks back as far-off in the past, but, for his idea 
 of which he draws in some measure on his own days. 
 The deities of the Iliad are colossal men and women, 
 stronger and fairer than mortals, able to work wonders 
 and to take any form they please, but not all-powerful 
 or all-wise, and often immoral. They dwell on the 
 high-crowned mountain Olympus, and are called the 
 Olympian gods. Zeus, a sensual, passionate, but 
 genial person (Jupiter the sky), is their chief, having 
 overthrown the dynasty of his father Cronus (Saturn), 
 which preceded the Olympian dynasty. Next to Zeus 
 are four great deities, — Here, his queen, with whom 
 he quarrels much; Apollo; Athene (who represents 
 especially intelligence) ; and Poseidon, god of the sea. 
 Other gods sometimes dispute the supremacy of Zeus, 
 and he quells them by threats or by force. The 
 gods act on man chiefly by hurting or comforting his 
 body in some way, and expect from him offerings 
 of savoury food and wine. In the Odyssey we find a 
 more spiritual conception. Olympus has become a 
 shadowy far-off place, where the gods dwell apart. 
 Zeus is now indisputably supreme. The gods now act 
 not only on man's body, but also, and chiefly, on his 
 mind and heart. They also wander over the earth in 
 disguise, spying out who are just among men. The 
 Homeric poems did much towards establishing a fixed 
 standard type for each deity, and reconciling the 
 inconsistencies of different local worships. But they 
 did not create this theology, which was far older. 
 
 10. Homeric Morality. — The Homeric gods 
 punish a man for disobeying or affronting them in 
 any way ; but they do not always punish him for 
 immoral actions. Fear of the gods, then, though 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 27 
 
 powerful as far as it goes, would not go very far 
 towards making the Homeric man moral. For that 
 he needs a moral law, independent of his religion. 
 Among the warriors of the Iliad, such a law is re- 
 presented chiefly by what the Greeks call aidos, and 
 which is often nearly what we call the sense of honour. 
 Along with, this, there is another principle which 
 comes out more clearly in the Odyssey than in the 
 Iliad. This is nemesis, literally 'distribution,' then, 
 that feeling which is roused in the mind by an unjust 
 distribution, — moral indignation. A man feels aidos 
 for the opinion of his neighbours. He feels nemesis 
 when his own sense of right is shocked. In the 
 Odyssey we find a riper moral sense than in the Iliad, 
 and a much larger number of words to express moral 
 distinctions. The age of reflection has begun, as the 
 bits of proverbial philosophy in the Odyssey show. 
 Homeric morality is high relatively to Homeric re- 
 ligion : but, as a rule, the Homeric man recognises 
 duties, not towards his fellow-creatures as such, but 
 only towards certain classes of them, who stand in a 
 special relation to himself, as masters, or dependents, 
 or guests, or suppliants. 
 
 n. Homeric Politics. — The Homeric Poems 
 give us the earliest sketch of certain political prin- 
 ciples which may be traced through every branch of 
 the Indo-European family of nations. Homeric poli- 
 tical life has three great elements — King, Council and 
 Assembly, — the germs of Monarchy, Aristocracy, De- 
 mocracy. The Homeric King (Basileus) leads his 
 people in war, he is supreme judge, and he takes the 
 chief part in public sacrifices to the gods, — but only as 
 the head of the family does in a private sacrifice : the 
 king is not a priest He rules by divine right. The 
 gods have given to his house that sceptre which he 
 received from his father, and which he will hand on to 
 his son. But his power is limited in three ways. 
 First, he must obey certain customs and traditions of 
 
28 GREEK LITERATURE. [part i. 
 
 his people, which form a body of unwritten yet posi- 
 tive law (iliemistes), and are the basis on which public 
 justice is administered. Secondly, he must consult his 
 Council (Boule) of nobles and elders. Thirdly, his 
 proposed measures must have the sanction of his 
 whole people in their Assembly (Agora). The com- 
 moners who make up this Assembly cannot originate 
 or discuss measures, they can only vote Aye or No. 
 The saucy Thersites in the Iliad attempts to make a 
 blustering speech, but sits down whimpering with a 
 red weal on his back from the staff of Odysseus. 
 In the Odyssey we see the beginning of a time when 
 the Assembly was beginning to play more than this 
 passive part, and when, on the other hand, the king's 
 successor was not necessarily his son or heir, but 
 might be one of the nobles who were now more 
 nearly on a level with him. 
 
 12. Homeric Manners are the social side of 
 Homeric politics. The public life is monarchical. 
 The social life is patriarchal. As the king cares for 
 his subjects, so the patriarch cares for his dependents. 
 The intercourse of the chiefs is marked by the courtesy 
 of a noble warrior caste, strangely mingled with brutal 
 ferocity. Achilles is the model of Greek knighthood. 
 His reception of the king Priam is worthy of a knight. 
 Yet even then Achilles feels the wild beast within him : 
 he dreads lest, at some rash word, his fury should 
 leap out, and he should slay his helpless old guest. 
 A tie of hospitality (xenia) or hereditary friendship is 
 held to exist between men whose fathers have enter- 
 tained each other, and this claim ensures a welcome. 
 Hospitality to all wayfarers is recognised as a duty, 
 since 'strangers and beggars are sent by Zeus'; but a 
 man who really 'welcomed all comers' is named in 
 the Iliad as if his virtue was memorable. Women 
 have a higher position and more freedom than in the 
 later historical age of Greece. Polygamy is unknown 
 among Greeks, and there are few exceptions to the 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 29 
 
 sanctity of marriage. The home-life of King Alcinous 
 and Queen Arete in the Odyssey is like a modern 
 picture of fireside happiness, and no image of girlhood 
 more noble or charming than Nausicaa can be found 
 in poetry. A touch in the Iliad shows real feeling for 
 the pathos of a lonely woman's life — the mention of 
 the ' true-hearted toiler', working all day long ' to win 
 a scanty wage for her children '. 
 
 13. The amusements of a chief's country life are 
 hunting, farming or gardening, playing at games such 
 as throwing the javelin or quoit, or, after a solid but 
 temperate dinner, listening to the minstrel's song. 
 The mistress of the house weaves or embroiders among 
 her handmaids. Queen Arete had made the robe 
 which Nausicaa gave to Odysseus : and the princess 
 helped her mother in household matters, being in 
 sole charge of the washing. Slaves were often of gentle 
 birth and nurture, having been taken in war or kid- 
 napped in childhood ; the latter was the case with 
 Eumaeus, the trusty swineherd of Odysseus; and we 
 see here how intimate might be the confidence between 
 master and old retainer. The Iliad gives us some 
 bright glimpses of simple, joyous life: the patriarchal 
 chief standing silent, glad at heart, among his reapers, 
 while food is being made ready under the trees ; the 
 troop of vintagers bearing the baskets of grapes 
 with dance and song from the vineyard ; the bridal 
 procession, with the marriage hymn sounding and 
 the bridegroom's friends dancing to flute and harp, 
 while the women stand at their doors to see it pass ; 
 the maidens, with their fine linen robes and fair 
 diadems, the youths with glossy tunics and golden 
 swords slung by silver belts, dancing to the minstrel's 
 music, while a delighted crowd looks on. 
 
 14. Homeric Arts and Knowledge. — One test 
 of civilisation is the material of which men make their 
 implements. Stone comes before metal. But the 
 metal age itself has periods. In the first period, men 
 
30 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 use the metals separately, or hammer them together, 
 but do not know how to smelt or fuse or solder 
 them. The Homeric poems belong to the end of 
 this first period. The next step is usually the smelt- 
 ing of copper with tin, so as to make bronze. The 
 metals named come thus in Homeric order of value: — 
 (i) gold; (2) silver; (3) tin; (4) 'cyanus' (a dark 
 metal, perhaps bronze, hardly blue steel); (5) iron; 
 (6) copper (chalcus, certainly not 'brass,' i.e. copper 
 + zinc) ; (7) lead. Fine works in metal are usually of 
 Phoenician workmanship, — as armour (cuirass, shield, 
 helmet), — bowls and vases, — ornamental baskets, — 
 clasps, brooches, necklaces, &c. There is no money. 
 A fine can be paid in gold and copper; 'two talents' 
 weight of gold' are once mentioned as a gift of honour ; 
 but oxen are the only regular measure of value. A 
 mad bargain is to exchange armour worth 100 oxen 
 for armour worth 9 : a precious daughter is one ' who 
 brings oxen ' (to her parents, in dower from her suitor). 
 There is no certain allusion to writing; in Iliad vn. 172 
 the heroes scratch their marks on their lots, and in 
 vi. 172 the 'signs' on the 'folded tablet' need not 
 be alphabetical. It does not necessarily follow that 
 the poet could not write himself. In the Odyssey we 
 hear of 'professional men' — physicians, soothsayers, 
 minstrels, heralds, artificers in wood and metal. 
 
 15. The earth is imagined as a sort of flat oval, 
 with the river Oceanus flowing round it. The poet 
 of the Iliad knows the coasts of Asia Minor and 
 their islands, but describes no scenery in Greece 
 Proper, and knows the lands to east and south 
 only from hearsay. The poet of the Odyssey had 
 probably never seen Ithaca or its neighbouring 
 islands, but knew the Peloponnesus and the eastern 
 parts of Greece Proper. Cyprus (whence 'copper') 
 is mentioned in both poems. The Nile is 'the 
 river Egypt.' Egyptian Thebes is the type of a rich 
 and glorious place — ranking with Orchomenus in 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 31 
 
 Boeotia and (for wealth) with Delphi. Its old great- 
 ness under Ramses was long past : Memphis was the 
 capital when these poets sang : but Thebes had 
 been embellished by Sesonchis, founder of the 22nd 
 Egyptian dynasty, and the fame of his march into 
 Syria may have reached Ionian poets of 930 — 900 B.C. 
 Sidon, capital and seaport of Phoenicia, is famous 
 for embroidery and metal work. Tyre is never named. 
 16. Homer. — The Greeks themselves, and all men 
 till the end of the last century, were nearly unanimous 
 in believing the Iliad and the Odyssey to be the work 
 of one poet, Homer. Homer is named in a spurious 
 fragment of Hesiod, but the earliest authentic men- 
 tion is in the philosopher and poet Xenophanes, who 
 flourished about 510 B.C. The name Homerus means 
 'fitted together,' and was the ordinary word for a 
 hostage, i. e. a pledge agreed upon between two parties. 
 But nothing was accurately known about his life or 
 date. Most opinions placed Homer either in the 
 time when the Ionian colonies in Asia Minor were 
 founded (about 1044 B.C.), or within a century later. 
 The philosopher Aristotle, who wrote on Homer, and 
 the Homeric critic Aristarchus, seem to have put him 
 about 1044 B.C. The historian Herodotus (440 B.c) 
 differing, probably, from most of his own contempo- 
 raries, made Homer, along with Hesiod, live as 
 late as 850 B.C. According to a Greek epigram, 
 Homer was claimed as son by Smyrna, Chios, 
 Colophon, Ithaca, Pylus, Argos, Athens. But all the 
 best evidence connects Homer with Smyrna, an ori- 
 ginally Aeolian city which afterwards became Ionian. 
 An ancient epithet for him is Melesigenes, ' son of 
 Meles', the name of a stream which flowed through 
 old Smyrna, on the border between Aeolis and Ionia. 
 This is significant when we remember that the Iliad 
 is an Ionian poem on Aeolian themes. The unknown 
 author of the ' Homeric ' Hymn to Apollo of Delos 
 speaks of himself as a blind old man living in Chios : 
 
32 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 the ancients thought that this Hymn was by Homer, 
 and thus the tradition of Homer's blindness was per- 
 petuated. The little island Ios, one of the Cyclades, 
 claimed to have Homer's grave. The Homeridae, 
 'Sons of Homer,' who claimed to be descendants 
 of the poet, lived in the Ionian island of Chios. 
 The art of epic poetry was hereditary in their house, 
 as poetry and music and other arts often were in 
 Greek families. 
 
 17. Early History of the Homeric Poems. 
 — Both Iliad and Odyssey had their first origin on the 
 Ionian coast of Asia Minor, and came thence to 
 Greece Proper. The Spartans said that their law- 
 giver Lycurgus first brought to Greece a complete 
 copy of the Poems, which he had got from the Creo- 
 phylidae, a family of poets in Samos. Athens was of 
 small account when the Iliad was first sung : the poem 
 mentions it only once, as 'a well-built town,' and 
 the only one of Athenian warriors who is mentioned 
 by name is quite obscure. But it was at Athens, 
 not at Sparta, that loving care for the poems was 
 first shown in Greece Proper. The traditions of this 
 care refer to the 6th century B.C., and, connect them- 
 selves with three names, the lawgiver Solon, the 
 tyrant Peisistratus, and his son Hipparchus 1 . Peisis- 
 tratus, in the last period of his rule (537 — 527 b. a), 
 is said to have commissioned some learned men, 
 of whom the poet Onomacritus was the chief, to 
 collect the poems of Homer. It is now generally 
 believed that an Iliad and an Odyssey already existed 
 in writing at that time, but that the text had become 
 much deranged, especially through the practice of re- 
 citing short passages without regard to their context. 
 Besides these two poems, many other epic poems or 
 
 1 According to a probable interpretation of the doubtful tradi- 
 tion, Solon provided that Homeric recitations should follow an 
 authorised text (hypoboti); Hipparchus, that they should observe 
 a regular order \hypolepsis). 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 33 
 
 fragments of the Ionian school went under Homer's 
 name. The great task, of the commission was to 
 collect all these ' poems of Homer ' into one body. 
 From this general stock, they may have supplied 
 what they thought wanting in the Iliad and Odyssey. 
 Their work cannot, in any case, have been critical 
 in a modern sense. But it can hardly be doubted 
 that some systematic attempt to preserve ' the poems 
 of Homer' was made in the reign of Peisistratus. 
 And one fact is certain. In the 6th century B.C. 
 reciters of ' Homeric poems' regularly competed for a 
 prize at the greatest of Athenian festivals, the Pana- 
 thenaea, held in every fourth year. 
 
 1 8. Rhapsodists. — These reciters were called 
 rhapsodists. ' Rhapsodist ' means literally ' a stitcher 
 of songs'; hence one who weaves a long, smoothly- 
 flowing chant, i. e. an epic poet, as chanting his poem 
 in a flowing recitative. The characters of poet and 
 reciter were always united, — first in the early min- 
 strel 3 then in the hereditary poets, such as the 
 Homeridae ; and then in the free guild of poets, 
 the rhapsodists, to whom the name of Homeridae 
 was extended. But the early minstrel sang to the 
 harp : the later ' rhapsodist ' merely chanted, with a 
 branch of laurel, the symbol of poetry, in his hand. 
 Those who tell how the people in an Indian village 
 still hang on the lips of him who recites one of the 
 great Indian epics help us to imagine the passionate 
 sympathy, the tears, the rapture, with which a Greek 
 crowd heard it told how the King of Troy knelt to 
 Achilles in his tent by night, or how the dying hound 
 in the court-yard of Odysseus just lived to give a feeble 
 welcome to the wanderer whom no one else knew. 
 
 19. Study of Homer in Greece. — The Homeric 
 poems were to the Greeks more than national poems 
 have ever been to any people. Every other people, 
 as it has grown older, has turned away from the poetry 
 of its youth, or has even allowed it to perish. Cicero 
 
34 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 mourns the loss of the early Roman lays ; the English 
 ballads in Percy's collection are mere gleanings of 
 a once great harvest ; Walter Scott was only in time 
 to save relics from the minstrelsy of the Border. But 
 the Homeric poems were simple and strong enough 
 to be popular early, and mature enough in art to 
 please an age of ripe culture. Boys learned Homer 
 by heart at school, priests quoted him touching the 
 gods, moralists went to him for maxims, statesmen 
 for arguments, cities for claims to territory or alliance,, 
 noble houses for the title-deeds of their fame. From 
 about 450 b.c. 'civic' or 'public' editions were 
 prepared by various cities for their own use at public 
 festivals. There was ' the edition of Massilia,' ' of 
 Chios,' ' of Sinope,' ' of Argos,' ' of Cyprus,' • of 
 Crete.' 'Private editions', the work of individual 
 revisers, were also numerous. The most famous of 
 these was that prepared by Aristotle for his pupil 
 Alexander, — known as 'the Edition of the Casket' 
 from the jewelled case in which Alexander is said 
 to have carried it about with him in the East. 
 
 The learned study of Homer at Alexandria reached 
 its highest point in Aristarchus (156 b. c), whose 
 revision of the text became the standard one, and is 
 mainly the basis of our own. The Alexandrian scholars 
 had no text as old as Peisistratus, and knew little 
 of what his Commission had done ; they used mainly 
 the editions of the cities, especially Massilia, Chios, 
 and Argos. The division of Iliad and Odyssey into 
 24 books each is usually ascribed to Aristarchus, but 
 may have been as old as 350 B.C. : before, the poems 
 had been divided by ' rhapsodies ' or short cantos : 
 thus our Book 1. of the Iliad contained two cantos, 
 ' The Anger ' and ' The Plague.' Aristarchus founded 
 a school of Homeric criticism which continued pro- 
 ductive till about 200 a. D. All this work is now 
 known only from scanty notices. 
 
 20. Our oldest and best manuscript of either 
 
chap. ii. J EPIC POETRY. 35 
 
 poem, the Venetus A of the Iliad, is of the ioth 
 century, and was found at Venice late in the last 
 century, along with some scholia or commentaries 
 which are of value as preserving remarks of Aris- 
 tarchus and other Alexandrian scholars. Hitherto 
 it had been thought that the text of Homer had 
 come down to us from about iooo B. c. It was 
 now seen that our text was not older than the Alex- 
 andrian age. The first printed edition of Homer, 
 revised by the Byzantine Demetrius Chalkondyles 
 (b. 1430, d. 15 10), was published at Florence in 1488 : 
 the first Aldine Edition at Venice in 1504. 
 
 21. The Homeric Question. — The belief that 
 Homer composed both Iliad and Odyssey was unques- 
 tioned, until, about 170 b. c, a grammarian Hella- 
 nicus, and one Xenon, asserted that Homer was the 
 author of the Iliad but not of the Odyssey. They and 
 their followers were called the Separaters (chori- 
 zontes), because they separated the Iliad, in its origin, 
 from the Odyssey. As to their grounds, we only know 
 that one of these was the style, and this implies lite- 
 rary study. Old Greece was uncritical, and believed 
 strongly in one author for both poems. The mere 
 fact that a double authorship should have been mooted 
 shows that there were good grounds for a natural doubt. 
 But the doubt found little acceptance. Aristarchus 
 wrote against ' the paradox of Xenon,' and the Roman 
 Seneca, writing • on the shortness of life,' regards this 
 as a question for which life is too short. 
 
 Early in the last century Vico, a Neapolitan (o. 1668, 
 d. 1744), in his ' Principles of New Knowledge,' main- 
 tained that the names of great lawgivers and poets of 
 the old world are symbols; thus ? Homer' is Greek Epic 
 Poetry ; ' Homer's poems ' were made by a series of 
 poets, and not written down at first ; and the Odyssey 
 is at least a century younger than the Iliad. But Vico 
 had no proofs. These were first offered by F. A. Wolf 
 in his Prolegomena (1795) or Introduction to his edi- 
 
36 GREEK LITERATURE: [parti. 
 
 tion of Homer. Neither the Iliad nor the Odyssey, he 
 says, was originally made as one poem. Each has 
 been put together from many small unwritten poems. 
 These, by different authors, had no common plan. 
 The Iliad and Odyssey were first framed from these, 
 and first written down, by the Commission of Peisis- 
 tratus. Wolfs theory — as throwing light on the origin 
 of popular poetry generally — roused enthusiasm in 
 Germany, which was then in literary revolt from art 
 to nature. 
 
 22. The result of Homeric study since Wolf has 
 been, not to prove any precise theory, but to gain 
 wider assent for certain propositions which narrow the 
 scope of the question. 
 
 The Iliad and the Odyssey belong to the 
 end, not to the beginning, of a poetical 
 epoch. They mark the highest point reached by a 
 school of poetry in Ionia, which began by shaping the 
 rude war-songs of Aeolic bards into short lays, and 
 gradually developed a style suited to heroic narrative. 
 
 23. The Iliad has been enlarged and remodelled, 
 by several hands, from a shorter poem, by one poet, 
 on the Wrath of Achilles. This original 'Wrath of 
 Achilles,' probably composed about 940 B.C., was not 
 merely a short lay, but a poem on a larger plan, in 
 which the central motive gave unity to a varied 
 action, and which might properly be called epic. It 
 may have been only the last and best of a lost series 
 of similar poems. But if it was the first of its kind, 
 then its author was the founder of the epic art, who 
 made the advance, not from the primitive war-song 
 to an epic on a grand scale, but from the lay to the 
 short epic. This supposition — that in the series of 
 Ionian poets there came one poet of marked original 
 genius — is favoured by the fixed belief of old Greece 
 in a personal Homer, especially if ' Homer ' cannot 
 be explained as a symbolical name 1 . 
 
 1 Homerus means 'fitted together,' not 'fitting together'; and 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 37 
 
 The Odyssey is mainly the work of one poet, who 
 was of later date than the author of the ' Wrath ', and 
 who used earlier lays about the return of the heroes 
 from Troy. It was probably composed about 890 — 
 850 B.C. : it has been interpolated, but not so much 
 as the Iliad, and its original plan has been little 
 altered. Both Iliad and Odyssey arose on the Ionian 
 coast or its islands, and came thence to Greece Proper : 
 though some later additions to the Odyssey may be 
 native to the Peloponnesus. 
 
 24. A family, such as the Homeridae, handing down 
 the poetical art from father to son, may have preserved 
 the poems, as precious heirlooms, by memory alone, 
 and tided them over an age in which writing was 
 not yet generally used for literary purposes. If, how- 
 ever, the art of writing was known in Ionia when the 
 'Wrath of Achilles' was composed, then it is con- 
 ceivable that the earliest epic poet should have used 
 it, even though a popular literary use of writing may 
 not have come in till much later. 
 
 25. The • Cyclic ' Poets. — There was a mass 
 of songs and legends about Troy which the two 
 great epics left untouched. This material was worked 
 up, between 776 b. c. and 550 B.C., by a number 
 of epic poets of the Ionian school, who aimed at 
 linking their poems with the Iliad and Odyssey as 
 introductions or continuations. In later times, com- 
 pilers of mythology used to make abstracts in prose 
 from these epics, taking them in the chronological 
 order of the events, so as to make one connected 
 story. Such a prose compilation was called an epic 
 cycle (or circle), and the compilers themselves were 
 called cyclic writers. In modern times the name 
 1 cyclic ' has been transferred from the prose com- 
 pilers to the poets. 
 
 it is doubtful whether it can be explained to mean 'versifier' or 
 ' compiler '. 
 15* 
 
38 GREEK L1TERA TURE. [part i. 
 
 26. The Greek grammarian Proclus (140 a. d.), in 
 his ' Literary Treasury,' tells us the names and subjects 
 of some epics belonging to the Trojan cycle of 
 myths. (1) The Cyprian Lays, so called from the 
 home of their author, Stasinus, related the prepara- 
 tions for the expedition to Troy, and the first nine 
 years of the siege, thus leading up to the Iliad. 
 (2) The Lay of Aethiopia, by Arctinus of Miletus, was 
 so called because the Aethiopian prince Memnon was 
 its hero, and continued the Iliad, telling how the 
 Amazons came to Troy, how Achilles slew their queen 
 and was himself slain by Paris. (3) The Sack of Troy, 
 by the same Arctinus, is a supplement to the last. 
 (4) The Little Lliad, by Lesches of Mitylene, continued 
 Homer's Iliad down to the fall of Troy, giving especial 
 prominence to Ajax and Philoctetes. (5) The Home- 
 ward Voyages, by Agias of Troezen, filled up the in- 
 terval of 10 years between the Homeric Iliad and 
 Odyssey with the adventures of various heroes imme- 
 diately after the end of the war. (6) The Lay of 
 Telegonus (Telegonia), by Eugammon of Cyrene, one 
 of the latest of these epic poets (about 566 b. c), told 
 how Telegonus, son of the enchantress Circe by 
 Odysseus, was sent by her to seek his father, and 
 slew him in Ithaca. 
 
 There was also a Theban cycle of myths, to 
 which belonged the Thebais (author unknown), re- 
 lating a war, earlier than the Trojan, between Argos 
 and Thebes, and the Epigoni or ' Descendants,' telling 
 of its renewal by the sons of the former warriors. 
 The latter, like the Cyprian Lays and other epics, 
 was ascribed to Homer in the time of Herodotus. 
 The Taking of Oechalia belonged to a circle of myths 
 about Heracles. These so-called Cyclic poems served 
 as a mine of fable for sculptors and for the Attic 
 dramatists. 
 
 27. Sportive 'Homeric' pieces. — Some hu- 
 morous trifles went under ' Homer's ' name, merely 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 39 
 
 because they were in the epic style of Ionia. Two 
 were celebrated. Margites (' The Booby ') was a comic 
 poem on a silly jack-of-all-trades, half milksop, half 
 coxcomb, ' who knew many things, but knew them 
 all badly.' We have only a few verses of the piece, 
 which may have been as old as about 700 B.C., and 
 which Aristotle regards as the first germ of comedy. 
 The Battle of the Frogs and Mice {Batrachomyo- 
 machid), of which we have about 300 lines, was 
 sometimes ascribed to Pigres, brother of Artemisia, 
 the queen of Halicarnassus who distinguished herself 
 in Xerxes' army. But it more probably belongs 
 to the declining days of the literature, and some put 
 it as late as 160 B.C. It was one of the first and most 
 popular parodies in the old world. 
 
 28. Hesiod. — Besides Homer, another great poet 
 was named in Greek tradition as the founder of 
 an epic school. This was Hesiod. What is known 
 of his life is gathered chiefly from the poems 
 ascribed to him. His father Dius had come from 
 Cyme, a town of Aeolis in Asia Minor, to the old 
 home of the Aeolians in Greece Proper, and had 
 settled on an upland farm at the village of Ascra, 
 near Mount Helicon in Boeotia. Poverty is said to 
 have been his reason. He found, perhaps, that he 
 could not make his way in the busy commercial world 
 of Asia Minor, and resolved to retire to a quiet 
 farmer's life in the old country, where at least a 
 subsistence was secure. Hesiod grumbles that Ascra 
 was 'dreary in winter, sultry in summer, good at 
 no season/ but he seems to be unjust to the fertile 
 and well-watered region. Here he fed his father's 
 sheep on Mount Helicon, and began his work as 
 poet. Later in life he is said to have removed to 
 Naupactus on the Gulf of Corinth in Locris— thus 
 passing from Aeolian to Dorian surroundings ; and 
 the Dorian influence has left traces in his work. He 
 was murdered (the legend said) at Oenoe in Locris, and 
 
40 GREEK LITERA TURE. [part i. 
 
 buried at Naupactus, whence his remains were .trans- 
 ferred in later times to the Boeotian Orchomenus. 
 
 His date cannot be exactly fixed. It is certain, 
 that he must be later, by some 80 or 100 years 
 than that great time of Ionian epos which is repre- 
 sented by the Iliad. On the other hand, he must 
 be considerably earlier than those poets of the 7 th 
 century B.C. who stand in the « dawning light of his- 
 tory. This seems clear, not only from particular facts, 
 but also from the way in which Hesiod is mention- 
 ed by Greek writers. Homer and Hesiod are the 
 two names that are always joined by Greek tra- 
 dition as representing the very oldest poetry. No 
 third name, which we can connect with authentic 
 work, is so decisively thrown back by Greek belief 
 into a far past. The best ancient and modern autho- 
 rities are probably right in placing Hesiod about 
 850 — 800 B.C. 
 
 29. The Homeric and Hesiodic types of 
 Epic Poetry. Hesiod has told us how he came to 
 be a poet. He was feeding his sheep on Mount 
 Helicon when the Muses appeared to him. ' House- 
 less shepherds ! ' they cried, speaking to Hesiod as 
 the representative shepherd — 'Creatures of reproach, 
 natures gross ! We can say many things that are 
 false, though like truth; but we know also, when 
 we choose, how to utter true things? And then they 
 commission Hesiod to be their spokesman. This 
 strikes the keynote of Hesiod's poetry. Its task was 
 to utter true things. The Homeric poetry of Ionia 
 moves among visions of the heroic past, to which the 
 poet's art gives an ideal glory. The Hesiodic poetry 
 of Boeotia moves among realities. It deals with the 
 tasks of daily life, with the practical duty of man, and 
 with those facts about gods and heroes which make 
 up religious knowledge. 
 
 30. The life out of which Hesiod's poetry sprang 
 was very different from that of Ionia. The daily 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 41 
 
 routine of dwellers in Boeotia was that of a quiet, inland 
 farming life ; it was not varied by brisk commerce 
 or seafaring adventure, by the bustle of an Ionian 
 harbour when a ship came in from Sidon or the Nile, 
 by the visits of men wearing a strange garb and 
 speaking in broken Greek of the marvels of strange 
 lands, or listening while, amid an eager crowd, some 
 Ionian minstrel chanted in the market-place a lay 
 of that great war in which Achilles and Hector fought. 
 The farmer in the old country led a life much less 
 stirring to the imagination. How could he best use 
 the winter and spring, so as to earn his rest in summer 
 when artichokes ripen and the cicala sings, when fat 
 kids and temperate cups refresh the sun-scorched 
 toiler ? When should he begin to reap his corn ? 
 How should the axle-tree of a waggon be made, and 
 what is the best wood for a plough-tail or a pole? 
 How are the cattle to be kept fit for work? What 
 is the best way of drying grapes ? And last, not least, 
 what are the lucky or unlucky days of the month 
 for doing all these things ? These were the questions 
 in Boeotia. 
 
 31. But Hesiod's poetry was not addressed merely 
 to rural labourers : it spoke to the nobles just as much, 
 — it spoke to all men, setting forth the moral precepts 
 and the religious lore which the poet thought most 
 important for them to know. The worship of Apollo 
 at Delphi had already spread its influence through 
 Greece Proper, and, under the teaching of the Delphic 
 priesthood, carried with it a belief in the immortality 
 of the soul. This belief was also inculcated by the 
 Dorian priesthoods of the Peloponnesus, who traced 
 their mystic doctrine from the mythical Melampus, 
 a seer of Argos. One of the chief points in this 
 doctrine was the existence of daemonic beings, inter- 
 mediate between gods and men, and connecting 
 living men with the dead. We see that Hesiod's 
 poetry had some contact with this Dorian teaching. 
 
42 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 He speaks of departed men of the golden Age be- 
 coming spirits (daimones), and haunting the earth, 
 invisible, to watch over justice. We see too, how, 
 in the spirit of Delphi, he regards the office of the poet 
 as closely connected with the office of the prophet, 
 and speaks as if he had some authority from the gods 
 to proclaim what men ought to believe and do. 
 
 32. Hesiod's Works and Days. — Hesiod's 
 chief poem is called 'Works and Days,' because it 
 treats of the works which the farmer has to do, and of 
 the days which are lucky or unlucky for doing them. 
 The name of didactic or teaching poetry is properly 
 given to poetry which puts the facts of some art or 
 science into verse, and surrounds them with beauties 
 of imagination or sentiment. Hesiod's poem is the 
 earliest extant poem of this sort. But we must dis- 
 tinguish Hesiod's work from that of later 'didactic' 
 authors who chose verse instead of prose merely 
 because it pleased their taste, or who merely put into 
 verse what had already been said in prose. In 
 Hesiod's time there was no prose literature, and if 
 he wanted to get a public hearing for his thoughts he 
 was obliged to put them into verse. His object was 
 to supply a practical need. His poem ought not to be 
 classed with an exquisite work of literary art, such 
 as Virgil's Georgics, but rather with such a work as 
 that of Thomas Tusser, a Suffolk farmer in the 16th 
 century, who wrote his ' Five Hundred Points of 
 Good Husbandry' in homely verse, to help other 
 farmers. 
 
 33. In the Works and Days there are really three 
 parts, which may once have been distinct — an intro- 
 ductory poem addressed to his brother Perses, — then 
 the 'Works' proper, — and then the 'Days' or Calen- 
 dar. Hesiod and his younger brother Perses had 
 divided the property left by their father, but Perses 
 had got the larger share, Hesiod says, by bribing 
 certain judges. Perses now lived in luxurious idle- 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 43 
 
 ness, and presently threatened Hesiod with another 
 lawsuit. Hesiod reminds Perses and the corrupt 
 judges that Justice, when wronged on earth, takes 
 refuge with her father Zeus. Here we meet with the 
 earliest fable in Greek literature, the Hawk and the 
 Nightingale. The hawk has the nightingale in his 
 clutches, and in answer to the captive's complaint 
 reminds her that ' might is right.' Here, too, the poet 
 describes the Five Ages of the world — the age of gold, 
 of silver, of bronze, of heroes or demi-gods (put in, 
 apparently, to make a place for the Homeric heroes) 
 — and of iron, in which the poet himself has the mis- 
 fortune to -live. From justice the theme changes to 
 work. ' Work, foolish Perses, work the work that the 
 gods have set for men.' A man who means to work 
 should provide himself with a house, an ox and house- 
 hold stuff, and that speedily, for delay fills no gran- 
 aries. The cry of the crane is the signal for ploughing : 
 the master must guide the plough, with many a prayer 
 to Zeus and Demeter, while a slave follows and covers 
 up the seed, 'to give trouble to the birds.' Then 
 come the rules for all the works and seasons of the 
 farmer's year, — and lastly the Calendar, the list of 
 lucky or unlucky days. ' Sometimes a day is a step- 
 mother, sometimes a mother ; therefore blessed is he 
 who knows them all, and works his work unblamed by 
 the immortals.' 
 
 34. The Theogony or Origin of the Gods, a 
 poem of 1022 lines, has come to us in a confused and 
 corrupt state, but is probably Hesiod's in the main, 
 as the ancients generally held. The belief that the 
 world was created by a Supreme Power, though very 
 old and widely-spread in the East, was never con- 
 genial to the Greeks. Their tendency was to think of 
 the world, not as made by a Creator, but as born out 
 of pre-existing elements. They spoke of the gods as 
 ' living for ever,' but they did not believe that the gods 
 had lived from eternity. So Hesiod's Theogony falls 
 
44 GREEK LITERA TURE. [part I. 
 
 into two chief parts. The first part tells how the 
 visible order of Nature arose. The second tells how 
 the gods were born. 
 
 From Chaos, a confused mass of atoms, come forth 
 Earth, Tartarus (Hell), Eros (Love), and Erebos 
 (Night). Erebos brings forth Aether (Day). Earth 
 produces the Heaven and the Sea. The ruling idea 
 of the legend is that light grows out of darkness and 
 form out of formlessness. 
 
 Earth, and her own offspring Heaven, now become 
 the parents of superhuman beings in the human form, 
 namely the elder gods and the gigantic Titans. 
 Cronus, one of these elder gods, begets Zeus. Zeus 
 makes war on his father Cronus, who is helped by the 
 Titans, and overthrows him. Zeus thus becomes king 
 of the Olympian gods, whose descent is next traced. 
 Here the original poem perhaps ended. In our text 
 the last 80 lines commence a genealogy of Heroes, sons 
 born by goddesses to men. 
 
 35. Source and Influence of the Theogony. 
 — The poet's chief sources in the Theogony must have 
 been old hymns preserved in the temples, and folk- 
 lore which lived in the mouths of the people. He 
 was not making a new system on an artistic plan of 
 his own. He was simply trying to piece together 
 a very old system of which he had found the frag- 
 ments, and which he did not always understand. 
 The legends massed together, rather than blended, 
 in this poem carry us back to days when the Greek 
 imagination was still struggling to bring clear shapes 
 out of the grand, but wild and half formless, legends 
 of an Asiatic Nature-worship. Hesiod's Theogony was 
 always a standard authority for Greeks who wrote 
 or taught about the gods. But it would be mis- 
 leading to compare its popular influence to that of 
 the Sacred Books of India or Persia. The Greeks 
 never had anything really like these, just as they 
 never had a sacerdotal caste, though there were priests 
 
chap, ii.] EPIC POETRY. 45 
 
 of local worships and temples. The Greek mind was 
 sometimes drawn towards mystic doctrine, but through 
 its whole history it resisted the rule of priests. 
 
 36. The Shield of Heracles, not by Hesiod, 
 but of later and perhaps composite authorship, is an 
 epic lay in 480 lines, and has for its framework a fight 
 between Heracles— son of Zeus, and the strongest 
 of mortals — and Cycnus, son of the War-god Ares. 
 Cycnus was a robber who used to plunder pilgrims 
 on their way through Thessaly to the temple of Apollo 
 at Delphi. This fight takes place in the sacred pre- 
 cinct of Apollo at Pagasae in Thessaly. Heracles 
 slays Cycnus, but the robber's father, the god Ares, 
 escapes to Olympus. The fight, however, is a mere 
 pretext for describing the shield made for Heracles 
 by the god Hephaestus. The description is imitated 
 from that of the shield of Achilles in the 18th Book 
 of the Iliad, but is greatly inferior to it. The Homeric 
 poet draws mainly on his own fancy. The Hesiodic 
 poet draws from real works of art, and dramatises 
 them. Heracles has the armour of an ordinary warrior; 
 but as early as 648 B.C. the epic poet Peisander set 
 the example of equipping Heracles with the lion's 
 skin, club, and bow 1 . Short epic pieces of this kind 
 were often copied by the early lyric poets. This piece 
 belongs to the decline of the Hesiodic school, when 
 it was beginning to lose its distinctness from the 
 Ionian school of Homer. Some rhapsodist has en- 
 larged it, by prefixing to it 56 lines belonging to 
 another poem which bore Hesiod's name — the Eoiae, 
 or Catalogue of Heroic Women. 
 
 37. This poem, the Eoiae (so called because each 
 
 1 An inscribed vase, of the date 450 — 400 B.C., found at 
 Rhodes, has for one of its subjects the slaying of Cycnus by 
 Heracles. Mr Percy Gardner thinks that the artist of this vase 
 probably had before him those parts of the Hesiodic poem which 
 describe the arming of Heracles and the fight, but not that part 
 which describes the shield. (Journal of Philology, vol. VII., 
 p. 215, 1877.) 
 
46 GREEK LITERATURE. [part i. 
 
 new personage was introduced by the words e hole, 
 1 or such as was she ',) celebrated the heroines of 
 Boeotia and Thessaly from whose union with gods 
 had sprung heroes ; and formed a fourth book to 
 the Catalogue of Women, an epic history of Dorian 
 and Aeolian women, famous indeed, but not of that 
 half-divine rank which belonged to the 'heroines.' 
 These names of poems show how the Hesiodic school 
 was connected with Dorian Locris, where the position 
 of women was peculiarly high. Such poems, whoever 
 wrote them, carried on Hesiod's idea — to gather 
 up the old legends, as they lived on in Greece 
 Proper — treating them, not as the Ionian poets did, 
 ideally, but rather as relics of a sacred history. 
 The Aegimius celebrated a Dorian king who made 
 war against the Lapithae, and who was a friend of 
 Heracles, — as was Ceyx, king of Trachis, whose 
 marriage was the subject of another poem. These 
 two poems, and the Shield of Heracles, show us that 
 Heracles, an especially Dorian hero, was a favourite 
 with the Hesiodic poets. The titles of two other lost 
 poems — the Maxims of Cheiron, the wise Centaur, 
 and the Lay of Melampus, a record of prophets and 
 prophetic lore — bring out the moral and mystic sides 
 of the school. 
 
 38. The point at which the Homeric and the 
 Hesiodic schools begin to meet is found, for us, 
 in the Homeric Hymns. A collection of thirty- 
 three longer or shorter pieces in hexameter verse has 
 come down to us with the title, ' Hymns or Pre- 
 ludes of Homer and the Homeridae.' To the title 
 of 'Hymns' they have no strict claim. They have 
 nothing to do with the formal worship of the gods. 
 It was usual for a rhapsodist to preface the recitation 
 of epic poetry by an address to some god. If he was 
 reciting at a festival, this prefatory address would be, 
 of course, to the god of the festival. Or he might 
 choose to honour some favourite local deity. Other- 
 
chap. ii.J EPIC POETRY. 47' 
 
 wise his choice of 'a deity was free. Pindar speaks of 
 l a prelude to Zeus,' '■from which the Homerid bards 
 {i.e. the rhapsodists) oft draw out their linked song.' 
 Our 'Homeric Hymns' are simply a collection of 
 such preludes — some long, some short — to various 
 deities,- drawn up, probably in Attica, for the use of 
 rhapsodists. Two thirds of the thirty-three end with 
 a verse in which the singer says that now he will pass 
 from the god .to another theme. And two of them 
 say expressly that this theme is to be the praise of 
 heroes. One of them (No. 8, a short prayer to Ares) 
 is distinct from the rest in character and tone. All 
 the rest are epic in spirit. Most of them narrate some 
 passage in the life of the deity addressed. The style 
 is that of the Ionian or ' Homeric ' school. But the 
 Boeotian and Dorian, or ' Hesiodic ' school, can be 
 clearly traced in some places, as in the Hymn to the 
 Pythian Apollo (No. 1, from v. 178 to the end), the 
 Hymn to Pan (No. 19), and the address to Apollo 
 and the Muses (No. 25). Hardly two of the whole 
 collection, probably, are by the same hand. Not one 
 of them belongs to the best days of Ionian epic poetry. 
 The period from 750 to 500 B.C. marks roughly the 
 limits of their origin, though the hymn to Hermes 
 may be later ; but few can be older than 660 u. c. 
 
 39. The Five Greater Hymns. — The first 
 ' Hymn ' of our collection is made up of two distinct 
 preludes : one to the Delian Apollo (verses 1 to 177); 
 and one to the Pythian Apollo (v. 178 to the end). 
 The first tells us how Apollo was born in Delos and 
 how his great festival was established there. The 
 second tells how Apollo came down from Olympus to 
 seek a shrine on earth, and after many wanderings 
 reached Delphi, where his temple and priesthood were 
 founded. Hermes (Hymn 11.), the young god of guile, 
 steals the cattle of Apollo from the Pierian hills, and 
 transfers them to his own pastures of Arcadia. Aphro- 
 dite (Hymn in.), the goddess of beauty, appears to 
 5 
 
48 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 Anchises, a young Trojan prince, as he watches his 
 flocks on Mount Ida; and, before she re-ascends to 
 Olympus, unfolds the great destiny that awaits their 
 son Aeneas. Demeter (Hymn iv.), in search for Perse- 
 phone, whom Pluto has carried away to the shades, 
 visits Eleusis, and there founds her worship, and re- 
 covers her daughter. 
 
 40. The Ionian Festival at Delos. — The 
 Hymn to the Delian Apollo gives us a glimpse of the 
 bright morning-time of Ionian song — the spring festival 
 of Apollo at Delos, — a sort of fair as well, — to which 
 Ionians came from the coast of Asia Minor and from 
 the islands of the Aegean. 'There, in thy honour, 
 Apollo, the long-robed Ionians assemble, with their 
 children and their gracious dames. So often as they 
 hold thy festival, they celebrate thee, for thy joy, with 
 boxing and dancing and song. A man would say that 
 they were strangers to death and old age evermore, 
 who should come on the Ionians thus gathered; 
 for he would see the goodliness of all the people, 
 and would rejoice in his soul, beholding the men 
 and the fairly-cinctured women, and their swift ships 
 and their great wealth ; and besides, that wonder of 
 which the fame shall not perish, the maidens of Delos, 
 handmaidens of Apollo the Far-Darter. First they 
 hymn Apollo, then Leto and Artemis delighting in 
 arrows ; and then they sing the praise of heroes of 
 yore and of women, and throw their spell over the 
 tribes of men.' But even, perhaps, when this song 
 was first sung, the time had come when Ionian min- 
 strels should not sing only the lays of the heroic past. 
 As men's life became larger and more thoughtful, as 
 freedom and knowledge grew, these Ionian worship- 
 pers at Delos learned to welcome the first tones of a 
 new poetry, busied with the joys and sorrows of the 
 living. 
 
CHAP, in.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 49 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETRY. LYRIC POETRY. 
 
 I. Elegiac and Iambic Poetry, 700—500 B. c. : Callmus (e.), 
 690 B.C.; Tyrtaeus (e.), 675 5 Archilochus (E. and I.), 670 ; 
 Simonides of Amorgus (I.), 660 5 Mimnermus (E.), 620 5 Solon 
 (e. and I.), 594; Theognis (E.), 540 ; Phocylides (E.), 540; 
 Xenophanes (e.), 510 J Hipponax (i.), 540 J Simonides of Ceos 
 (E.), 480. 
 
 II. Lyric Poetry, 670 — 440 B.C. i. Aeolian School: Alcaeus, 
 Sappho, 610 B.C. Anacreon, 530- 2. Dorian School: 
 Alcman, 660 B.C.; Stesichorus, 620; Arion, 600 B.C.; 
 Ibycus, 540 B.C. 3. Lyric Poetry, Dorian in form, but na- 
 tional in spirit: Simonides of Ceos, 480 B.C.; Pindar, 470- 
 
 i. Rise of the New Poetry. — Between 750 
 and 500 b.c. a great change passed over the Greek 
 world. Monarchy gave place to oligarchy, (the rule 
 of the noble few), and this again, in many places, to 
 a tyranny, — i.e. the unconstitutional rule of one 
 man who had seized supreme power. Lastly, as the 
 tyrannies were put down, democracies arose in many 
 cities, especially among the Ionians. These revolu- 
 tions brought much strife with them ; men's minds 
 were moved and their experiences enlarged. The 
 ordinary Homeric man is merely one of a crowd, who 
 is sometimes asked to say Yes or No. Now the 
 private citizen begins to think and act more inde- 
 pendently. He has wider influence, higher work, 
 finer pleasures, more to stir his mind and warm his 
 fancy. Knowledge is widening its circle, the fine arts 
 are slowly ripening, science is struggling to its birth, 
 life is growing eager and full. But as yet there is 
 hardly any prose writing. If a man would get a hear- 
 ing for his thoughts, he must utter them in verse. We 
 have seen how reflection has been gradually coming 
 
5° GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 into poetry. The Iliad has little of it ; the Odyssey 
 more; Hesiod much more. And now, about 700 
 B.C., in this dawn of large promise, the poet comes 
 forward with his first distinct attempt to interest other 
 people in his own thoughts and feelings. The expres- 
 sion took two forms, created almost at the same time 
 — those of Elegiac and Iambic poetry. 
 
 2. Elegiac metre. — The word elegos is probably 
 not Greek by origin, but the Greek form of a name 
 given by the Carians and Lydians of Asia Minor 
 to a mournful song accompanied by the flute. A 
 particular metre, being at first used by the Greeks for 
 such a song, may thence have come to be called the 
 elegiac metre. This was borrowed from the familiar 
 and universal metre of the earliest Greek poetry, — 
 the epic hexameter. Take these two hexameters of 
 Clough's :— 
 
 123 4 5 
 
 O let us ] try, Jie | answered, the | waters them | selves will sup | 
 6 
 port us, I 
 
 1 * 3.45 
 
 Yea very | ripples and | waves will | form to a | boat under | 
 6 
 neath us. 
 
 In the second line, omit will from the 3rd place and 
 us from the 6th. It has now been turned from an 
 hexameter, or ' six-metre' verse, into a pentameter, or 
 'five-metre' verse, since the two odd syllables, ' waves' 
 and 'neath', count together as one metre. And the 
 two lines together now form an elegiac couplet. A 
 poem composed of such couplets is an elegiac poem. 
 
 3. Character of Elegiac Poetry. — 'Elegy,' 
 Coleridge says, ' is the form of poetry natural to the 
 reflective mind ;' and it may treat of any subject, he 
 adds, if it does so with reference to the poet him- 
 self. Greek elegy exemplifies this. It deals with the 
 greatest variety of subjects, — the wars which the poet's 
 city is waging, — the political feuds among the citizens, 
 
chap, in.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 5 I 
 
 — the laws or principles which the poet wishes them 
 to adopt, — his own opinions on the manners or morals 
 of the day, — his views as to the best way of enjoying 
 life, — festive pleasure, — lamentation for the dead, — 
 everything that the poet and his friends are wont to 
 think or talk of. But, whatever the subject may be, 
 this early Greek Elegy has always two general charac- 
 teristics. It is the expression of the poet's own 
 thoughts or feelings, addressed to a sympathising 
 society. And this expression, though free and full, 
 though animated or earnest, stops short of being pas- 
 sionate. The later Greek poets of the Alexandrian 
 age wrote elaborate love-elegies of a languishing kind, 
 or made elegy a vehicle for the display of learning. 
 The Roman elegiac poets imitated chiefly this Alex- 
 andrian type, and, with all their beauty, have little 
 of the fresh, simple animation or pathos that belonged 
 to the elegiac poetry of early Greece. 
 
 4. The flute-accompaniment was an essential part 
 of early Greek elegies, which were sung after dinner 
 among friends, and had a social, almost confidential, 
 and often convivial character. This soft music of the 
 Lydian flute must be distinguished from those wild, 
 stirring strains of the Phrygian flute which belonged 
 to the worship of Cybele. The connexion with the 
 flute points to the non-Greek origin of Elegy The 
 musical instruments specially developed by the Greeks 
 themselves were string-instruments ; wind-instruments, 
 such as the flute, came to them from their neighbours 
 in Asia. 
 
 5. Iambic Poetry. — ' Iambus' (vj — ) is probably 
 a Greek word, from iapto, ' to dart or shoot,' hence ' a 
 taunt or gibe,' because the light, smart iambic metre 
 was first used in the raillery which entered into the 
 worship of Demeter, as into a modern carnival. The 
 story, invented to explain this usage, was that, when 
 Demeter was plunged in grief for the loss of her 
 daughter, the first smile was drawn from her by the 
 
52 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti, 
 
 jests of the maiden Iambe. The commonest form of 
 the iambic metre was the verse of six iambic feet 
 or three iambic metres (hence 'iambic trimeter') in 
 which the dialogue of Attic tragedy was written. 
 Shakspere often uses it in rapid dialogue or retort ; 
 here is an iambic trimeter : — 
 
 Then let's | make haste | away, || and look | unto | the main. 
 
 This metre, at first used for satire, was fitted to 
 express any pointed thought. Thus it was used for 
 fables, and for reflection of a graver, keener sort 
 than suited elegy. It was the form in which the 
 more original and intense spirits loved to utter their 
 scorn or their deeper thought and emotion. The 
 elegiac and early iambic poetry, both Ionian, may be 
 considered as forming together a single stage in the 
 growth of the literature, between the epic and the 
 lyric 
 
 6. Callinus of Ephesus, about 690 B.C., is the 
 earliest of the Greek Elegists. During the reign of 
 Ardys, King of Lydia, the Cimmerians, a fierce tribe 
 of northern Europe, broke into Asia Minor, took 
 Sardis, and invaded Ionia. Another horde, the 
 Treres, followed them, but were driven back. The 
 Cimmerians, however, long vexed Ionia ; and the 
 verses of Callinus which remain are a spirited appeal 
 to the Ionians to rise against the invaders. The music 
 of the flute, martial as well as funereal, easily lent itself 
 to warlike elegy. 
 
 7. Tyrtaeus lived in the days of the Second 
 Messenian War (685 — 668 B.C.), and was an Ionian, 
 if not actually a native of Attica, who migrated to 
 Lacedaemon. In a poem called Good Government 
 (Eunomia) he sought to allay a sedition among the 
 Spartans —those whose estates had been ravaged in 
 the war were clamouring for a new distribution of 
 lands — by reminding them that the Spartan laws have 
 been founded by Apollo himself. The two Kings, the 
 
.chap, in.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 53 
 
 Elders and the Commons together form a body to 
 which each member owes loyalty. In a series of 
 stirring elegiac lays, called his Exhortations, he urged 
 the Spartans to fight to the death against the Mes- 
 senians. In after-days the Spartans used to recite 
 these Spartan songs of an Ionian bard at the evening 
 camp-meaL Tyrtaeus wrote marching-songs too, which 
 the Spartans sang as they went into battle — not 
 elegiac, but in an anapaestic metre {y ^ — ) : one of 
 them begins, 
 
 To the fy-ont, \ ye brave sdns \ of Sparta. 
 
 8. Archilochus (670 b.c), an Ionian of the isle 
 of Paros, who migrated to the isle of Thasos with a 
 colony, was a vigorous genius, whom the Greeks of 
 the classical age even ranked with Homer and Pindar 
 and Sophocles as one of the great original forces in 
 their literature. The islanders of Thasos were often 
 at war with the Thracians of the mainland, and Archi- 
 lochus, a warrior himself, sang of war in his elegies. 
 He turned elegy also to the mourning for the dead, in 
 a beautiful poem on his sister's husband, who was 
 drowned at sea. But his native power came out most 
 in the mastery which he showed over iambic poetry, 
 first made famous by his skill. The story that his 
 iambic satire drove Neobule and her sisters to suicide 
 (the father Lycambes had promised Neobule in mar- 
 riage to Archilochus, and had broken his word) may 
 be a myth, but assuredly it expresses the terrible 
 power of this new scourge, public satire, over the hot 
 Ionian blood. Simonides of Amorgus (660 b.c.) 
 carried on the satiric use of iambic poetry, but in a 
 general, rather than a personal, form. The longest frag- 
 ment is a quaint satire on the female sex, in which it is 
 said that the gods have made women after the natures 
 of various animals — the fox, the cat, and so forth. 
 
 9. Mimnermus (620 b.c.) of Smyrna makes his 
 elegiac poetry a true mirror of soft, degenerate Ionia. 
 
 16* 
 
54 GREEK LITERA TURE. [part i. 
 
 He looks back sorrowfully to the old days when the 
 men of Smyrna drove back the Lydians : but he 
 acquiesces. Life, he says, is worthless when its prime is 
 over : ' may the doom of death overtake me, free from 
 disease and care, — at sixty.' He pities the very sun for 
 his daily labour in lighting the world. 
 
 Solon (594 b.c), the great lawgiver, used elegy 
 more in the manner of Callinus or Tyrtaeus. In 
 his early manhood, his stirring verses moved the 
 Athenians to win back Salamis from the Megarians. 
 And when he had carried his great reforms, elegy 
 became the voice of his calm joy. ' I gave the com- 
 mon folk as much strength as is enough, neither 
 less nor more than their due meed; but as to those 
 who had rule, and the splendour of wealth, to them 
 also I gave counsel, even that they should not up- 
 hold cruelty. I took my stand, I spread my strong 
 shield over both, and suffered neither to prevail by 
 wrong.' Solon raised the dignity of Elegy by thus 
 confiding to it his great political deeds ; and he made 
 it also the vehicle of moral teaching. His use of 
 iambic poetry shows the old tradition, for in it he 
 brings out the controversial side of his public life. 
 
 10. Theognis (540 b.c), a Dorian noble of 
 Megara, has left us about 1400 elegiac verses in the 
 Ionic dialect — much more than we have from any 
 early Greek elegist — in which he seeks to impress the 
 orthodox doctrines of the Dorian aristocracy on a 
 young Megarian noble named Cyrnus, and puts in 
 many quaint bits of worldly wisdom by the way. His 
 tone, and the respectability of his views, made him 
 a standard author in Attic schools, and his text has 
 been much confused by additions. He was driven 
 out of Megara by a democratic revolution, and visited 
 the vine-clad lowlands of Euboea, and then Sicily — 
 returning to Megara at last, for he seems to have been 
 there shortly before the Persian Wars. He speaks re- 
 gretfully of a time when the common folk of Megara 
 
chap, in.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 55 
 
 were clad in goatskins, and were as shy of the city as 
 deer — keeping to the hills or the seashore. The 
 nobles are the good, the people are ' poor creatures'. 
 ' Money,' he says, ' mixes race ' ; but such marriages 
 are the bane of the city. Conservative Attic fathers 
 liked his politics ; and his wise sayings were so well 
 known that it became a proverb, I knew that before 
 Theognis was born. 
 
 11. Phbcylides of Miletus (540 b. c.) was another 
 moralising elegist, whose short pithy precepts were 
 very popular in Greece. He also wrote hexameters, 
 of which we have a few; but the poem in 230 verses, 
 entitled ' Maxims,' under his name, is probably by 
 an Alexandrian Jew of the first century a.d. Xeno- 
 phanes of Colophon (510 b. c), founder of the 
 Eleatic philosophy, made elegy the utterance of philo- 
 sophic thought. He blamed Homer and Hesiod for 
 imputing immoral acts to the gods, and said that it 
 would be better to record good deeds that had really 
 been done than fables about Titans and Centaurs. 
 Poetry was the great popular influence in early Greece, 
 and we often find Greek philosophy trying to correct 
 this influence. Xenophanes is interesting as a poet- 
 philosopher protesting against the vulgar poetry. 
 
 Simonides of Ceos (480 b.c.) wrote beautiful 
 elegiac epitaphs on Greeks who fell in the Persian 
 Wars ; but he was more famous as a lyric poet. In 
 the Attic age (475 — 300 B.C.), when dramatic poetry 
 was foremost, the elegiac was still popular as an 
 easy, elegant form of composition which all culti- 
 vated men could use on occasion — as for inscrip- 
 tions, epigrams, or short pieces meant for friends. 
 We hear of elegiacs having been written not only 
 by all the great Attic poets, but by the Attic masters 
 of prose, such as Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, De- 
 mosthenes. In the Alexandrian age, sentiment, court 
 flattery, learning, all found elegiac expression. 
 
 12. Hipponax of Ephesus (540 b.c.) was driven 
 
56 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 from his native city and reduced to poverty by its 
 tyrants, and settled at Clazomenae. He was an ugly, 
 spiteful little man, and two sculptors of the place 
 caricatured him ; whereupon he revenged himself in 
 bitter iambic verses, composed in a curious hobbling 
 metre, produced by changing the last foot (y — ) into 
 
 a spondee ( ). This metre became known as the 
 
 'lame 'or ' limping ' iambic (' choliambic' : 'scazon'). 
 The fragments have some interest as giving us 
 glimpses of the lower Ionian life, and some homely 
 words. Fables found a natural expression in iambic 
 verse — especially beast-fables, which have always 
 something of satire in them ; thus an iambic frag- 
 ment of Archilochus begins a fable about an alli- 
 ance between a fox and an eagle. The Alexandrian 
 poet Callimachus used the ' limping ' iambic metre 
 of Hipponax, and it was adopted also by Babrius 
 (about 40 a. d.) in his collection of fables. 
 
 13. .Lyric Poetry, in the usual modern sense, 
 is such poetry as is capable by its form of being sung 
 to music. The Greek lyric poetry was not only 
 capable of being sung to music, but was inseparable 
 from music. The poetry and the music toge- 
 ther formed a single work of art. All the Greek 
 lyric poets were necessarily, in some degree, musical 
 composers. ! Lyric ' was not the usual Greek word. 
 The Greeks more commonly spoke of melic poetry, 
 i.e. poetry meant to be sung, as distinguished from 
 poetry meant, like the epic, to be recited. 
 
 14. It follows that Greek lyric poetry could not 
 be artistic until the art of Music had been de- 
 veloped. Terpander (about 660 B. c.) is said to 
 have made the first great epoch in Greek music by 
 giving the lyre seven strings instead of four. This 
 means the discovery of the octave; for, as the 8th 
 note only reproduces the 1st, an instrument with 
 seven notes can express the whole diatonic scale. 
 Henceforth the Greeks distinguished three principal 
 
chap, in.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 57 
 
 modes or 'harmonies' with four subordinate modes ; 
 the seven-stringed instrument could be tuned to any 
 one of these seven ' modes.' The distinction between 
 the ' modes ' corresponded to our distinction between 
 'major' and 'minor' keys. The difference of the 
 ' modes ' depended on the place of the semitones in 
 the octave. The Dorian mode (a minor scale, as 
 we should say) was thought appropriate to earnest or 
 to warlike melodies ; the Phrygian (also of a minor 
 character) to passion ; the Lydian (a major scale) 
 to soft pathos. The Greeks had a subtle feeling 
 for the moral tone of the 'modes.' Plato would 
 admit the lofty Phrygian and the spirited Dorian 
 modes in his ideal commonwealth, but not the ener- 
 vating Lydian. The little that is known of Greek 
 melody suggests that it was simple, but not, to 
 our ears, especially pleasing. It is likely that they 
 knew some of the main principles of harmony; but 
 their practice, at least, seems to have been somewhat 
 crude. 
 
 15. Greek lyric poetry was not limited to a small 
 circle by being thus inseparable from music, for 
 music was a regular part of a liberal edu- 
 cation. Boys at school had lessons from the harpist, 
 and learned at least to distinguish the different ' modes,' 
 and to be able to play a simple accompaniment. In 
 one of the comedies of Aristophanes it is a joke 
 against the demagogue Cleon that when he was a 
 boy at school he always insisted on tuning his lyre 
 on the Dorian scale (with a pun on doron, 'a bribe'), 
 and could never learn any other, till the music- 
 master lost all patience. Aristotle insists on the value 
 of this practical training in music, not only as a 
 discipline of taste and character, but as preparing 
 a noble source of recreation for after life ; he only 
 urges that a citizen must not unfit himself for manly 
 exercises in labouring to become as skilful as a pro- 
 fessional musician. 
 
58 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 i 6. Aeolian Lyric Poetry. — The Aeolians of 
 Lesbos were famous from early times for music and 
 lyric song, regularly cultivated in their musical schools. 
 The old legend told how, when the bard Orpheus was 
 torn in pieces by the bacchants of Thrace, his head 
 and his lyre were swept down the river Hebrus to the 
 sea, while song still came from the dead lips, and were 
 washed ashore at Antissa in Lesbos, where the Les- 
 bians buried the head, and hung up the lyre in the 
 temple of Apollo. Both the early poetry of Pieria 
 and the soft instrumental music of Lydia had in- 
 fluenced the lyric art of Lesbos. Here the fiery 
 Aeolian temperament was quickened by special causes. 
 In the 7th century b. c. Lesbos was a commercial and 
 naval power. Party strife was restless in the island. 
 The nobles, whose power was not seldom threatened 
 or overthrown by the commons, lived a life of stormy 
 excitement, of love and war, of luxury and hardship, 
 of haughty dominion or homeless exile. 
 
 These changes, like sunlight and shadow flitting over 
 a summer sea, were mirrored in their Lyric Poetry. It 
 had a rapid flow, a gay careless grace often lit up by 
 a sudden glow of passion, and a wonderful melody. 
 But the Aeolian dialect was comparatively meagre 
 and rude for the uses of art ; and this prevented 
 the Aeolian poetry from ever becoming so generally 
 popular as the Dorian. The Aeolian ode was usually 
 meant to be sung by a single voice, and was on a 
 light and simple plan, suited to the swift and burning 
 utterance of the poet's mood. 
 
 17. Alcaeus, a Lesbian noble of Mitylene (about 
 611 — 580 B.C.), took an active part in the strife of 
 the Lesbian nobles against the commons, as well as in 
 a war between Lesbos and Athens for the possession of 
 Sigeum in the Troad : and he told in his poetry — 
 with the same frankness as Archilochus and Horace — 
 how he once threw away his shield. About 606 b. c, 
 when Pittacus was made dictator of Lesbos by the 
 
chap, in.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 59 
 
 commons, Alcaeus with his two brothers went into 
 exile, and spent many years in the East. He was 
 finally reconciled to the home government, and died 
 in Lesbos. He wrote hymns to the gods, political 
 songs, drinking songs, songs of war and love ; but 
 we have only a few fragments of his poetry. One 
 fragment describes a warrior's hall hung round with 
 gleaming, white-plumed helmets, greaves, cuirasses, 
 shields and broadswords. Another compares the Les- 
 bian State to a storm-tossed ship ; the water is coming 
 in, the sail is torn, the anchor will not hold, the waves 
 come this way and that, — the mariners are driven 
 before the tempest. This, like some others, is in that 
 Alcaic stanza which takes its name from him, and 
 which Horace adopted. Mr Tennyson has given a 
 specimen of it to English readers : — 
 
 O mighty-mouthed inventor of harmonies, 
 O skilled to sing of time or eternity, 
 God-gifted organ-voice of England, 
 Milton, a name to resound for ages. 
 
 In another fragment Alcaeus bids his comrades for- 
 get the wild weather outside the warm room, heap logs 
 on the fire, mix the dark wine, and call for garlands 
 and perfumes. Elsewhere he denounces the tyrants of 
 Lesbos. Alcaeus was in some respects not unlike a 
 Royalist soldier of the age of the Stuarts. He had 
 the high spirit and reckless gaiety, the love of country 
 bound up with belief in a caste, the licence tempered 
 by generosity and sometimes by tenderness, of a cava- 
 lier who has seen good and evil days. Two lines 
 of his remain to link his name with another not less 
 famous. ' Chaste Sappho, with thy dark tresses and 
 thy gentle smile, fain would I speak, but awe restrains 
 me.' 
 
 1 8. Sappho (610 B.C.) was a woman of sur- 
 passing artistic genius, exquisitely sensitive to the 
 harmonies of form and sound, whose passionate energy 
 found a natural expression in poetry, and who uttered 
 
60 _ GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 in poetry her worship of beauty. No Greek woman 
 of the Ionian race is known to have excelled in 
 poetry; and no Aeolian or Dorian woman, except 
 Sappho, is known to have made poetry the personal 
 expression of an intense life. She was helped to do 
 this, not only by the glow of the Aeolian blood that 
 fired her genius, but also by the large and rich life with 
 which Aeolian society surrounded women of the higher 
 rank. This is what gives their unique interest to the 
 few fragments that remain of her work, fragments 
 of incomparable melody, with a clear flame burning 
 through the musical words. She appears to have been 
 the centre of a poetical school or group, and from 
 one of the most celebrated of her disciples, Erinna, 
 some fragments remain. Sappho is said to have left 
 Mitylene about 596 b.c, and to have died in Sicily. 
 The story of her hopeless love for Phaon, and of her 
 springing from the Leucadian cliff into the sea, is 
 probably a later fable. The Sapphic stanza was only 
 one of many metres used by Sappho. Horace, in 
 adapting it for Latin use, has modified its rules, and 
 retains its most characteristic rhythm only in a few 
 lines, such as Laurea donandus Apolllnari. The follow- 
 ing stanza preserves the genuine Greek cadence : — 
 
 Faded every violet, all the roses ; 
 Gone the glorious promise, and the victim 
 Broken in this anger of Aphrodite 
 Yields to the victor 1 . 
 
 19. Anacreon, of Teos, a city on the coast of 
 Ionia, who flourished about 530 B.C., wrote in a 
 mainly Ionian dialect, but is akin to the Aeolian 
 School in the matter and the form of his lyrics. He 
 lived for some time at the brilliant court of Polycrates, 
 tyrant of Samos; then at Athens with Hipparchus, 
 son of the tyrant Peisistratus, and afterwards, it is said, 
 in Thessaly with the princely Aleuadae. Anacreon 
 
 1 For this stanza the writer is indebted to the kindness of 
 Mr Tennyson. 
 
chap. Hi.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 6 1 
 
 was the poet of pleasure. His pliant Ionian nature 
 fitted him for the life of a gay society. Love, wine, 
 and music were his joys. He seems to have gone 
 through his long life on easy terms with the world, 
 cherishing no ambition except that of enjoyment, and 
 no regret save for the flight of youth. The few 
 genuine fragments of his work are from hymns, or 
 poems of love and society; they show a pure style, 
 light grace, sweetness, and touches of satirical humour. 
 The collection of about 60 short pieces under his name 
 was first put together in the tenth century. These 
 spurious Anacreontea are probably all of the Christian 
 era, and many as late as 500 a.d. They have, on the 
 whole, little of classical merit ; the form is somewhat 
 wooden, and the fancy barren ; but they are often 
 as bright and pretty as elegant industry could make 
 them. 
 
 20. Dorian Lyric Poetry. — Dorian and Aeolian 
 life had this in common, that both were based on the 
 rule of a warlike aristocracy. But the Aeolian State 
 was frequently shaken by fickle and fiery passion : it 
 was indeed the storm-driven ship to which Alcaeus 
 likened it. The Dorian State was anchored to the 
 steadfast faith of the Dorian people in their gods and 
 in the usages handed down by their fathers. A Dorian 
 commonwealth was a compact body held together by 
 a military discipline, to which each member was 
 proudly loyal. A stamp of severe symmetry and 
 majesty belonged to the rites of the Dorian religion, 
 to the Dorian temples and statues and poems. Dorian 
 Lyric Poetry was the expression of Dorian life in all 
 its public or social energies. The Dorian lyrist, unlike 
 the Aeolian, says little of himself. He sets forth the 
 consecrated tradition and the ancestral glory of the 
 Dorian race for Dorians gathered at the worship of the 
 gods, at the celebration of some victory in the athletic 
 games, at a festival commemorating the foundation of 
 a city or the great deeds of a living king. In its 
 
62 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 most distinctive forms, Dorian Lyric Poetry was meant 
 to be sung, not by a single voice, but by a chorus. 
 
 21. It follows from the nature of this poetry that 
 its history does not present to us a single personality 
 so strongly marked as those of the Aeolian Alcaeus 
 and Sappho. We have here, not vivid characters, but 
 rather phases in the development of an art. Alcman 
 of Sparta (660 B.C.) wrote hymns ; songs to be sung 
 during processions to temples (prosodia), especially 
 parthenia to be sung by maidens; paeans, i.e. songs 
 imploring or praising the health-giving power of the 
 gods; nuptial chants, and love-songs. He was the 
 first who gave an artistic form to the choral lyric by 
 arranging that the chorus, while singing, should execute 
 alternately a movement to the right (strophe, 'turning'), 
 and a movement to the left {antistrophe) ; and he com- 
 posed the songs which the chorus was to sing in 
 couples of stanzas called strophe and antistrophe, 
 answering to these balanced movements. His frag- 
 ments have a special interest as samples of the Dorian 
 dialect in its Laconian or Spartan variety. 
 
 22. Stesichorus of Himera in Sicily (620 b.c.) — 
 whose real name was Tisias, but whose skill procured 
 him this name Stesichorus, ' marshal of choruses,' — 
 completed the form of the choral lyric by adding to 
 strophe and antistrophe a third part, the epdde, sung 
 by the chorus while it remained stationary after the 
 movements to right and left. Stesichorus treated 
 epic subjects, such as the legends of Troy, in his 
 lyric poems ; hence Horace speaks of his stately 
 muse. There was a story current in the old world 
 that Helen, now a goddess, struck this poet blind 
 because he had sung evil of her, but restored his 
 sight when he had composed a recantation (or palinode) 
 beginning : — ' This story is not true ; thou didst not go 
 to Troy.' 
 
 23. Arion, (600 b.c), though a Lesbian by birth, 
 belongs by art rather to the Dorian school. His 
 
chap, m.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 63 
 
 great work was to give the dithyramb, or choral 
 hymn to Dionysus, a finished choral form, by fixing the 
 number (50) of the cyclic or circular chorus that was 
 to sing it, grouped round the altar, and by dividing 
 the singing and acting parts clearly from each other. 
 We have a fragment by him, addressed to Poseidon, 
 and telling of Poseidon's servants, the dolphins, who 
 had wafted the poet safely to land, when he had lost 
 his course at sea. A fable grew up that certain 
 wicked sailors had thrown Arion overboard, and that 
 the dolphins, charmed by his songs, had saved him. 
 Ibycus, of Rhegium in South Italy (540), was 
 closely akin as a poet to Stesichorus. His choral 
 hymns were on like subjects, about heroic wars, and 
 had the same epic character of style. He also wrote 
 love-poems. The story went that Ibycus was mur- 
 dered at sea, but that his murderers were found out 
 through some cranes that followed the ship ; and these 
 ' cranes of Ibycus ' became a proverb for the agency of 
 the gods in revealing crime. 
 
 24. In the Persian Wars the Greeks had for the 
 first time to fight as one people against a foreign foe. 
 The Greeks beat back the Persians. After this great 
 victory, Greece was safer, and the Greek cities every- 
 where became more prosperous. One result of the 
 Persian Wars was to make the Greeks in Sicily and 
 Asia and all over the world feel that they were one 
 people with the same interests. Another result was 
 to make Athens the most popular and powerful city 
 in Greece. The people of Attica were the most gifted 
 of the Ionian race ; and the political importance of 
 Athens now gave a large opening to the Athenian 
 genius. 
 
 25. Simonides, of the Ionian island of Ceos, was 
 born in 556 B.C. and died in 468 B.C. He spent some 
 time at Athens in the reign of Hipparchus ; then he 
 visited Thessaly. About 478 he came to Athens again, 
 and finally he went to the court of Hieron, tyrant of 
 
64 GREEK LITERATURE. [parti. 
 
 Syracuse. His great fame is connected with the time 
 of the Persian Wars, 480 — 478 B.C. He writes his 
 lyrics in the Dorian dialect, and belongs, as regards 
 lyric form, to the choral Dorian school. But he was 
 by birth an Ionian, and wrote elegiacs in the Ionic 
 dialect. And his highest renown is associated with that 
 of Athens. Thus in him Ionian genius and Dorian art 
 meet at Athens, and he marks a new era — the begin- 
 ning of a lyric poetry addressed to all Greece, 
 taking its spring from Athens, the future centre of 
 Greek intellectual life. His fragments represent hymns 
 to the gods, paeans, odes on victors in the games, 
 dirges, and other lyric varieties. His elegiac epitaphs 
 on those who fell at the battles of Thermopylae and 
 Salamis are admirable. But nothing that remains of 
 his poetry is more beautiful than a fragment of a 
 dirge, describing Danae with her infant son Perseus, 
 when her father Acrisius has sent her adrift in an ark 
 on the sea; and as darkness comes and the storm 
 arises, the child is afraid ; but Danae comforts and 
 hushes him, and prays to the gods that the storm also 
 may slumber. 
 
 26. Bacchylides, the nephew of Simonides, lived, 
 like his uncle, at Hieron's court, and used the choral 
 lyric style with brilliant grace and finish, but in a 
 lower strain. His fragments, which are of various 
 kinds, often show a certain enthusiasm for the bright 
 pleasures of peaceful life, and we might even fancy 
 that we saw in him a reaction from the warlike spirit 
 called forth by the struggle with Persia. 
 
 27. Pindar was born, about 522 B.C., at the 
 village of Cynoscephalae near Thebes in Boeotia. He 
 was of a noble family, the Aegidae, who had borne 
 a part in the oldest wars of Sparta. Thus, though he 
 grew up in an Aeolian land, he was connected in 
 blood with the Dorians. The art of flute-playing was 
 hereditary in his house; for, in these great days of 
 Greece, a noble art, such as music, was cherished by 
 
chap, in.] ELE GIA C, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 65 
 
 the noblest as the gift of the gods. The story went 
 that in his youth he was defeated in a poetical com- 
 petition by the Theban poetess Corinna. Subse- 
 quently he showed her a poem in which, acting on 
 her own hint, he had used Theban mythology. But 
 he had been too profuse. 'You ought to sow with 
 the hand, not with the sack,' said Corinna. Pindar 
 had lessons too from the musician LAsus of Hermione. 
 He began his poetical career at the age of twenty, 
 with an ode on a Thessalian youth's victory in the 
 games. He grew to be the national lyrist of Greece. 
 It is a sign of the coming time that he also pays his 
 homage to Athens, — 'the bulwark of Hellas,' the 
 city that ' laid the foundation of freedom.' He was 
 honoured by the Dorian princes of Sicily — Hieron 
 of Syracuse and Theron of Acragas — and visited 
 them, but declined to make Sicily his permanent 
 home. He was held in veneration throughout Greece ; 
 and received the distinction of being regularly invited 
 to the sacred banquet (theoxenia) given at Delphi to 
 the embassies who attended the festivals of Apollo. 
 He died at the age of 79, in 443 B.C. An iron chair 
 in which he had sat was preserved in the temple at 
 Delphi. Two conquerors of Thebes, — the Spartan 
 king Pausanias in the Peloponnesian War, and 
 Alexander the Great — 
 
 'bade spare 
 
 The house of Pindarus, when temple and tower 
 
 Went to the ground.' 
 
 28. The remains of Pindar's work represent almost 
 every kind of lyric poem. The fragments may be 
 classified as follows: — 1. Hymns to Persephone, to 
 Fortune, and in praise of Thebes and its gods. 2. 
 Paeans to Apollo of Delphi and Zeus of Dodona. 
 3. Choral dithyrambs to Dionysus. 4. Processional 
 Songs, for the people of Delos and of Aegina. 5. 
 Choral songs for maidens ; — one addressed to ' Pan, 
 lord of Arcadia, watcher of the awful shrine ' (of 
 
66 GREEK LITER A TURE. [part i. 
 
 Cybele). 6. Choral dance-songs, — ' hyporchemes,' as the 
 Greeks called them, in which the words were accom- 
 panied by a lively dance or pantomime expressive of 
 the action ; they arose from the early Cretan war- 
 dances, and were used especially in the worship of 
 Apollo, as a relief to the solemn paean. One of these 
 was written for the Thebans, and was connected with 
 a propitiatory rite following an eclipse of the sun, 
 probably in 463 B.C. 7. Encomia : laudatory odes (in 
 praise of men, and thus distinguished from hymns in 
 praise of gods) sung by the festive troop or comus. 
 8. Scolid : festive songs to be sung at banquets by a 
 comus or festive troop. 9. Dirges, to be sung to the 
 flute, with choral dance. 
 
 29. Besides the fragments, we have forty-four 
 complete Epinicia, or Odes of Victory, in which 
 Pindar celebrated victories in great national games. 
 Fourteen odes belong to the games at Olympia, 
 held once in four years. The prize was a wreath 
 of wild olive. Twelve odes belong to the Pythian 
 games, held at Delphi in honour of Apollo, once in 
 four years, in the 3rd year of each Olympiad : the 
 prize was a wreath of laurel. Seven odes belong to 
 the Nemean games, held at Nemea in honour of 
 Zeus, once in two years, the 2nd and 4th of each 
 Olympiad : the prize was a wreath of pine. Eleven 
 odes belong to the Isthmian games, held at the 
 Isthmus of Corinth, in honour of Poseidon, once in 
 two years, in the 1st and 3rd years of each Olym- 
 piad : the prize was a wreath of parsley. Among all 
 these odes of which the dates can be fixed, the earliest 
 is the 10th Pythian, in 502 B.C. ; the latest, the 
 5th Olympian, in 452 b.c. The dialect is epic with 
 a strong Dorian colouring, and a few Aeolic forms. 
 The music was of a different character in different odes. 
 Where it was Dorian, the poetry is most serene and 
 elevated, and the mythical stories are most fully 
 treated : where it was Aeolian, the odes are rapid, free, 
 
chap, in.] ELEGIAC, IAMBIC, LYRIC POETRY. 67 
 
 careless, gay : where it was Lydian, the poem has a 
 gentle or suppliant tone, as in approaching a temple 
 or altar. 
 
 30. The ode of victory was sometimes recited at 
 the place where the games were held, on the evening 
 of the contest ; as when at Olympia ' the lovely light 
 of the fair-faced moon beamed forth, and all the holy 
 place sounded with festal joy': sometimes on the 
 victor's return to his native city, either at a banquet, 
 or during a procession to a temple. The odes differ 
 much in style and length. Thus the last Olympian 
 ode, on a boy's victory in the boys' short foot-race, 
 consists of only 19 lines, being merely a thanksgiving 
 to the Graces, in whose temple it is sung. The fourth 
 Pythian ode, in honour of a victory gained in the 
 chariot-race by Arcesilas, king of the Greek colony of 
 Cyrene in Africa, is of 299 lines, and includes a grand 
 epic story in lyric form, — the story of Jason sailing in 
 the ship Argo to Colchis, and, with Medea's help, 
 bringing back the golden fleece. This ode was 
 brought out at Cyrene with a splendid chorus. 
 
 31. Pindar's treatment of the myths. — Pindar 
 seldom dwells much on the details of any particular 
 victory. In the case of the chariot-race, the most im- 
 portant contest of all, it was not easy to connect the 
 actual victory with the personal merit of the owner, 
 unless he had also been the driver. Pindar usually 
 takes some heroic legend or group of legends con- 
 nected with the victor or the victor's city, and makes 
 this his main theme. Thus, in the fourth Pythian, 
 the link between Jason's story and the king of 
 Cyrene is found in the tradition that Cyrene had 
 been colonised from the island of Thera by the de- 
 scendants of one of Jason's comrades. In treating 
 the legends, Pindar aims especially at bringing out 
 their moral, and applying this to the victor or his city. 
 If we wish to understand Pindar's place among his 
 contemporaries, we must never forget how closely 
 
68 GREEK LITERATURE. [part I. 
 
 these legends which he interpreted were bound up 
 with Greek religion, and with the belief of Greek 
 cities and great Greek families about their own origin. 
 
 32.. The loss of the music by which Pindar's Odes 
 were accompanied deprives us of an indispensable aid 
 to the comprehension of their effect as works of art. 
 And, if the music were extant, modern imagination 
 would still have to supply the scenic accessories of a 
 gorgeous festival, the light, the colour, the movement, 
 the glowing sympathy of a brilliant audience with the 
 newly won or freshly remembered victory which shed 
 a reflected lustre on the victor's native city, the thrill 
 of patriotic pride responding to each allusion, faint 
 or dark, perhaps, for us, that touched some house- 
 hold word of inherited renown, the sense of deepened 
 spiritual life with which Greeks for whom the faith of 
 their fathers was still a vital force heard the secret 
 lessons of divine lore drawn forth by that great poet of 
 all Greece in whom the priests of the Delphian Apollo 
 revered the full inspiration of their god. Pindar's 
 achievement cannot be measured by a literary criti- 
 cism of his text. The glory of his song has passed 
 for ever from the world with the sound of the rolling 
 harmonies on which it once was borne, with the 
 splendour of rushing chariots and athletic forms 
 around which it threw its radiance, with the white- 
 pillared cities by the Aegean or Sicilian sea in which 
 it wrought its spell, with the beliefs or joys which 
 it ennobled; but those who love his poetry, and 
 who strive to enter into its high places, can still know 
 that they breathe a pure and bracing air, and can still 
 feel vibrating through a clear calm sky the strong 
 pulse of the eagle's wings as he soars with steady 
 eyes against the sun. 
 
 33. Thus the two greatest lyric poets, Simonides 
 and Pindar, carried Lyric Poetry into a wider field. 
 With them, while it is mainly Dorian in form, it 
 ceases to belong, by spirit, to any one division of the 
 
chap, x.] THE DRAMA. 69 
 
 Greek people. It begins to speak to all the Greeks 
 about those great traditions and deeds which make up 
 the common faith and fame. And now the law of 
 natural growth which goes all through Greek litera- 
 ture calls on another branch of the Greek race to do 
 its part. 
 
 PART II. THE ATTIC LITERATURE. 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 THE DRAMA. 
 
 Tragedy. Aeschylus, 525 — 456 B.C. Sophocles, 495—405 
 
 B.C. Euripides, 480 — 406 B.C. 
 The Old Comedy. Aristophanes, 448— 385 B.C. The Middle 
 
 Comedy, 390—320 B.C.; the Neiu Comedy, 320—250 B.C. 
 
 i. The people of Attica belonged to the Ionian 
 face, but had a stamp of their own which distinguished 
 them from the Ionians in the colonies of Asia Minor. 
 Aristotle remarked that the Greek temperament, like 
 the Greek climate, is a happy mean between its neigh- 
 bours on west and east; the Greek is more intelligent 
 than the brave European, and more manly than the 
 subtle Asiatic. The like might be said of the Attic 
 temperament as compared with those two others which 
 form the great standing contrast in Greek history, the 
 Ionian and the Dorian. The Athenian mind has the 
 elasticity and bright grace of the Ionian. It has the 
 fortitude and sober intelligence of the Dorian. But it 
 is not, like the Ionian, effeminate, nor, like the Dorian, 
 rigid. The Attic language is like the Attic mind, flexible 
 without too much softness, precise and vigorous with- 
 out harshness. The Epic poetry of the Ionians and 
 the choral Lyric poetry of the Dorians were blended 
 
 IV* 
 
70 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 by the Attic genius in a new poetical form, which 
 has more varied interest, but which also demands 
 more various power, than any other — the drama. 
 Artistic drama was the creation of Athens. 
 
 2. Origin of drama. — From early times, we saw, 
 the Greek conceived his deities as men and women, 
 with more than human power, but susceptible of 
 human joy or sorrow, malice or partisanship. The more 
 a Greek entered into the spirit of his religion, the 
 more personal sympathy he would feel with his gods' 
 joy or sorrow. Now, among all the Greek gods, there 
 was none that appealed to human sympathy more 
 vividly than Dionysus, the god of wine, the giver of 
 physical joy and excitement, the enemy of every- 
 thing that can darken or deaden the vital spirit in 
 man. Dionysus was described as traversing the earth 
 in a progress full of danger and anguish and triumph, 
 as overcoming bitter foes divine or human, as establish- 
 ing his worship in India, in Asia, in Greece; and 
 through these legends there ran a mystic undercurrent 
 of allusion to a place where those who" have been 
 faithful on earth shall drink after death of a cup 
 stronger and sweeter than wine. 
 
 3. His festivals belonged to the season when 
 the grapes were gathered, — when the wine-press was 
 busy, — when, in mid-winter, last year's cask was 
 tapped, — or when the return of spring brought the 
 first sunshine for the vines. In December the people 
 of Attica kept the Vintage Feast, — the 'Lesser' 
 or 'Rural' Dionysia; in January, the Feast of the 
 Wine-press (Lenaea) ; in February, the Anthesteria, 
 the merry ' Feast of Flowers,' when last year's wine 
 was opened ; and in March, the Great Dionysia. 
 The last three were kept at Athens, the first was kept 
 in the country. Imagine, then, the people of an 
 Attic village gathered together to keep the Vintage 
 Feast of Dionysus at the foot of the warm, vine-clad 
 hills. There is a rustic altar of wood or turf. Rustic 
 
chap. I.] THE DRAMA. 7 1 
 
 singers gather round it to sing a hymn in honour 
 of the god, relating some of his well-known adventures. 
 The story said that Dionysus was attended in his 
 wanderings by certain woodland beings, the satyrs, 
 with long pointed ears, snub noses, and goats' tails. 
 It would be natural for the rustic worshippers, singing 
 of the god's fortunes, to feign that they themselves 
 were such satyrs, to speak of his victory or suffering as 
 if they had seen it. This would seem to bring them 
 nearer to their god. 
 
 4. And then, in their yearning to imagine his 
 deeds more vividly, another step would soon be taken. 
 The leader of the chorus would enact the character of 
 Dionysus himself, or of a messenger from him. He 
 would relate some exploit of the god, or some danger 
 which the god had gone through. The chorus would 
 then express in song the feelings which the recital 
 awakened. Here, then, we should have the first 
 germ of drama — that is of poetry, not in narra- 
 tive only, like epic, but in action. The choral 
 hymn sung to Dionysus on such occasions was called the 
 dithyramb. From the dithyramb sprang both Tragedy 
 and Comedy. Tragedy means the ' goat-song,' because 
 a goat was sacrificed to Dionysus before the choral 
 hymn was sung. Comedy means the ' village-song,' 
 this same hymn looked at from another point of view, 
 as bringing out the jests of a rustic carnival. But this 
 chorus must at first have been of a very rude kind, — 
 little more than a rustic band of revellers led by a 
 flute-player. The musician and poet Arion (600 B.C.) 
 was the first to give the dithyramb a regular lyric 
 form. He arranged it to be sung at the festivals 
 of Dionysus by a trained chorus of fifty persons, 
 grouped round the altar, and hence called a cyclic or 
 circular chorus. 
 
 5. This artistic chorus to Dionysus first came in 
 among the Dorians. But it was in Attica that the 
 next steps were taken. Thespis (536 B.C.) was a 
 7 
 
72 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 leader of dithyrambic choruses, who made a slight 
 improvement by arranging that the dialogue about 
 Dionysus should be no longer between the leader and 
 the whole chorus, but between the leader and one 
 member of the chorus specially appointed for that pur- 
 pose. The leader or coryphaeus stood on a raised 
 platform, and in the pauses of the choral song held 
 a dialogue with this one member of the chorus, who 
 was called the answerer, {hypocrites), — afterwards the 
 ordinary Greek word for actor. Thespis must not 
 be regarded as the founder of Tragedy. The story 
 that he went about the country with a company of 
 strolling players, acting his plays on a waggon, comes 
 from a confusion. In the processions of Dionysus 
 and Demeter, there was free licence of rough jesting 
 among the crowd ; and jokes from a cart became 
 proverbial. 
 
 6. Phrynichus of Athens (512 — 476) still used 
 only one actor, but improved the organisation of the 
 chorus, sometimes subdividing it into smaller bands, 
 one of which might represent a group of maidens, 
 another a group of elders, or the like. One of his 
 choral performances represented the Capture of Mi- 
 letus, the chief town of Ionia, in the last year of the 
 Ionian Revolt (494 b.c). The Athenians were so 
 moved, Herodotus says, that they fined the poet, who 
 had set before them the sufferings of their kinsmen, 
 'for reminding them of their own misfortunes.' In 
 his Phoenissae (476 b.c.) Phrynichus celebrated the 
 deeds of Athens in the Persian Wars : one group of 
 the chorus represented Phoenician women who had 
 been sent to the Persian court, while another group 
 represented Persian elders. 
 
 7. ' Satyric ' pieces. — The satyrs, or goat-like 
 attendants of Dionysus, still kept their old place in 
 his traditional worship. And as the choral perform- 
 ance became more refined and artistic, a special 
 entertainment was set apart for the purpose of bringing 
 
chap. I.] THE DRAMA. 73 
 
 in these grotesque beings. In this the chorus repre- 
 sented satyrs, as in the early days of the dithyramb. 
 Choerilus (524 — 465) of Athens is named as 'king 
 of the Satyr-play ' ; and it was further developed by 
 Pratinas (500 — 460 b.c.) a Dorian of Phlius who 
 came to Athens. 
 
 8. Aeschylus, the real founder of Tragedy, 
 was an Athenian of the township of Eleusis, and was 
 born in 525 B.C. The family of his father Euphorion 
 was ancient and distinguished. At the age of 25, in 
 500 B.C., Aeschylus competed for the tragic prize with 
 Pratinas; but Phrynichus was his chief rival in his 
 earlier career. Either then or soon afterwards he 
 brought in the change which first created true drama. 
 The ' tragedy ' which Aeschylus found existing was a 
 sacred choral entertainment somewhat like a modern 
 oratorio, in which the choral song and music were 
 occasionally relieved by the recitative of a single 
 actor, or by dialogue between this actor and the 
 leader of the Chorus. Aeschylus introduced a second 
 actor. The dialogue now became independent of 
 the Chorus. The two actors, by varying their parts, 
 could act a complete story from beginning to end. 
 The Chorus took part in this action by giving counsel 
 or encouragement to the actors, or by uttering the 
 feelings which the events would move in a thoughtful 
 spectator. Hitherto the dialogue had been secondary 
 to the choral song. Now the choral song became 
 secondary to the dialogue. Drama is now 
 mature : since now a complete action can be re- 
 presented as passing before the eye. We have seven 
 great tragedies by Aeschylus. But before we can 
 understand these, we must have some notion of what 
 a performance in a Greek theatre was like. 
 
 9. Tragedy was acted at three of the four 
 Dionysiac festivals, the Lesser Dionysia, the Lenaea, 
 and the Greater Dionysia. But the production of a 
 new tragedy always took place either at the Lenaea 
 
74 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 or at the Greater Dionysia. A poet's first object was 
 to get a chorus. Several tragic choruses were required 
 for each festival. Citizens, chosen from the ten Attic 
 tribes in turn, paid for the dresses and for the musical 
 training of the choruses. This was a costly but a very 
 popular public service. Men vied with each other in 
 doing it handsomely : a tragic chorus sometimes cost 
 about .£120, equivalent to many times that sum now : 
 and the choregiis whose chorus was best trained and 
 dressed got a prize. The ' Street of Tripods ' at Athens 
 was adorned with monuments of such victories, and we 
 still have the beautiful monument of Lysicrates, cho- 
 regus in 335 B.C. A poet who wished to bring out a 
 tragedy applied to the ' King Archon,' who had the 
 control of the sacred festivals, for a chorus. If this 
 was granted, the poet had next to train it, and to get 
 his actors. In the early days of tragic art, the tragic 
 poet often acted himself. Later, professional actors 
 were paid by the State, and the poets sometimes cast lots 
 for a chief actor, who then chose his own subordinates. 
 A third actor was first used by Sophocles in 468 B.C., 
 and one of his late plays, the Oedipus at Co/onus, 
 requires a fourth actor. ' Mute persons,' such as 
 guards, servants, &c, could be brought on the stage in 
 addition to the regular actors. The women's parts 
 were acted by men. When the principal character in 
 the piece is a woman, the chorus ' is composed of 
 women ; unless the poet wishes, for artistic reasons, to 
 isolate the heroine, as in the Antigone of Sophocles, 
 where the chorus consists of Theban Elders. 
 
 10. A trilogy was a group of three tragedies. 
 A tetralogy was a group of three tragedies with a 
 satyr-drama added to them. We are told that Aeschy- 
 lus was the first who set the example of competing for 
 the prize with three tragedies, — acted successively, and 
 representing subjects connected with each other, — 
 followed by a satyr-drama. Three plays of Aeschylus, 
 — the Agamemnon, the Choephori, and the Eumen- 
 
chap, i.] THE DRAMA. 75 
 
 ides, — form the only extant example of such a trilogy. 
 They are usually called collectively the Oresteia, i.e. 
 ' the story of Orestes' : but the Athenians seem to have 
 given this name only to the Choephori, or to the 
 Choephori with the Eumenides. Sophocles 'began 
 the custom of contending with a single play, and not 
 a tetralogy ' : and this is explained to mean that, 
 though he brought out tetralogies, the four pieces 
 composing each of them were not connected in 
 subject. It is probable that the tragic poet did not 
 always or necessarily bring out a trilogy, but might 
 also compete with a single tragedy : under what con- 
 ditions, however, we cannot tell. 
 
 ii. The Greek Theatre. — The early tragic 
 choruses had performed on a temporary wooden plat- 
 form, sometimes in the market-place. There was an 
 old proverb for a bad place at a spectacle, — ' A view 
 from the poplar,' — because people used to climb a 
 poplar tree near the market-place when they could not 
 get seats. Once this platform gave way, — in 500 B.C., it 
 is said, when Aeschylus and Pratinas were competing 
 — and it was then decided to build a more lasting stage 
 in honour of the god Dionysus. The famous Theatre 
 of Dionysus was begun about 500 B.C. It was in 
 the form of a half-circle, open to the sky, and was 
 situated on a piece of ground, sacred to Dionysus, 
 called the Lenaeo'n, or Place of the Wine-press, at the 
 foot of the Acropolis on its south-east side. The 
 upper tiers of seats for the spectators were hewn out of 
 the natural rock of the Acropolis ; the lower tiers were 
 made artificially of wood or stone; and a stage was 
 built of stone, with a high back wall to shut it in. 
 
 12. Now imagine yourself sitting in one of the 
 upper tiers of seats, with your back to the Acropolis 
 and your face towards Mount Hymettus where it 
 slopes to the sea, looking down into the theatre. The 
 house can easily hold upwards of 20,000 people, and 
 we hear of as many as 30,000 being present. That 
 
7 6 GREEK LITERATURE. [part h. 
 
 long, very narrow platform is what we should call the 
 stage, and what the Greeks called the speaking-place, 
 because the dialogue of the actors was held upon it. 
 The high wall at the back of the stage is the scene. 
 In Tragedy, the hangings or painted wood-work with 
 which it is covered represent usually a temple or a 
 palace ; in Comedy, a street of Athens or a private 
 house. There are three doors in it, through which 
 the actors pass in and out. The long stage, you 
 see, is much too narrow for such crowded spectacles 
 or complicated effects as are seen on the deep modern 
 stages. 
 
 13. At the middle point of the stage, some steps — 
 known as ' Charon's staircase,' because the ghost some- 
 times comes up by them — lead down into what we 
 should call the pit. The Greeks call it the orchestra or 
 dancing-place. It is a semicircle, bounded by the 
 lowest row of seats and by the stage. No spectators 
 are admitted to it. It is kept exclusively for the 
 chorus. The altar which you see in the middle of 
 the orchestra is the ihymele or altar of Dionysus. It 
 will form the central point of the choral dances. 
 
 14. The lowest tier of seats, immediately round the 
 orchestra, contains 67 stalls of white marble, reserved 
 for priests and magistrates, and is divided into 13 
 compartments by passages which run the whole way up 
 to the topmost row of seats, so as to cut the theatre 
 into 13 wedge-like segments. There is also a broad 
 cross-passage, dividing the upper block of tiers from 
 the lower. The place of honour, exactly in the centre 
 of the lowest half-circle, is occupied by the priest of 
 Dionysus, with the priest of Apollo on his right, and 
 on his left the priest of Zeus Polieus, or ' Guardian of 
 the City.' The theatre is a sacred place ; both Tragedy 
 and Comedy are acts of public worship. 
 
 15. The general effect of a Greek tragedy 
 was unlike anything on the modern stage. It de- 
 pended chiefly on two things. First, the story repre- 
 
chap. I.] THE DRAMA. 77 
 
 sented was one which the whole audience knew in its 
 main outlines, and which they regarded as sacred, since 
 the persons were the gods and heroes of their race. 
 Secondly, there was little animated gesture or move- 
 ment on the stage. The two or three actors stood 
 there more like a group of majestic statues. They 
 wore masks ; for the calm grandeur of Greek tragedy 
 could dispense with animated play of feature, which 
 would, indeed, have been lost on the spectators in so 
 large a space. In a play like Oedipus the King, 
 where Oedipus puts out his own eyes, this would 
 not happen on the stage, but would be related 
 by a messenger, and Oedipus would come on in a 
 different mask. The tragic actor was made up to 
 look larger than human with the long tragic mask, a 
 sort of high wig, padding, and very thick-soled boots 
 or buskins. Hence Milton speaks of tragedy as 'the 
 buskin'd stage' — but alludes to Ben Jonson's come- 
 dies as 'Jonson's learned sock,' because the ancient 
 comic actors wore slippers {socci). 
 
 16. The costume of tragic actors was usually of one 
 general character, — that which was worn at proces- 
 sions or festivals of the god Dionysus : a striped robe 
 falling in folds to the feet, often with a long train, 
 with a high, broad band or girdle ; over this, a mantle 
 (' chlamys,' the Roman palla) of bright colour. This 
 general type of costume could be varied so as to ex- 
 press the different conditions of the persons, but the 
 sacred, festal character was always kept ; it was never, 
 in the classical days, merely theatrical. Partial changes 
 of side-scenery could be effected by ' the revolving 
 doors,' as they were called, triangular prisms on pivots 
 at the sides of the stage. Changes of the whole back- 
 scene occur nowhere in tragedy, except in the Ajax 
 of Sophocles, and in the Eumenides (perhaps, too, the 
 Choephori) of Aeschylus ; when a curtain would be 
 drawn up (not dropped) to conceal the operation. 
 There were mechanical contrivances for suspending 
 
78 GREEK LITERATURE. [part il 
 
 gods in the air, and for showing the interior of a 
 house through the open central door. 
 
 17. Structure of a tragedy. — The first part 
 of the dialogue, before the chorus came in, was called 
 the prologue. The song of the chorus, as they 
 marched into the orchestra and took their place, 
 was called the parodos. Each choral song which 
 they afterwards sang at their station was called a 
 stasimon. An episode was the portion of the play 
 contained between any two stasima. The part after 
 the last stasimon to the end was the exodus. A lyric 
 dirge, in which the actor on the stage and the chorus 
 in the orchestra both took part, was called a commus. 
 The songs of the chorus practically divide the tragedy 
 into acts, usually about four or five in number. The 
 shortest Greek tragedy that we have contains less than 
 900 lines ; the longest, upwards of 1 700. 
 
 18. Suppose that we are in the Theatre of Diony- 
 sus at the great festival of the god : there is an audience 
 of some 25,000, not only Athenian citizens and women 
 (the latter placed apart from the men in the upper 
 rows), but Greeks from other cities, and ambassadors 
 seated near the priests and magistrates in the places 
 next the orchestra. We are to see the Eumenides or 
 Furies of Aeschylus. The orchestra is empty at pre- 
 sent. The scene, or wall behind the stage, represents 
 the temple of Apollo at Delphi. It has three doors. 
 Enter, from the middle or 'royal' door, the aged 
 priestess of Apollo; she wears a long striped robe, 
 and over her shoulders a saffron mantle. Pilgrims 
 are waiting to consult the oracle; and she speaks a 
 prayer before she goes into the inner chamber of the 
 temple, to take her place on the three-footed throne, 
 round which vapours rise from the cavern beneath. 
 Then she passes into the shrine through the central 
 door. 
 
 19. But she quickly returns in horror. A murderer, 
 she says, is kneeling there, and the ghastly Furies, his 
 
chap, i.] THE DRAMA. 79 
 
 pursuers, are asleep around him. As she quits the stage 
 by the side-door on the right, two figures come forth 
 by the central door, as if from the inner shrine. One 
 of them wears the costume of the Pythian festival at 
 Delphi, — a long tunic, gaily striped, with sleeves, and 
 a light mantle of purple, hanging from the shoulders. 
 In his left hand he has a golden bow. This is the god 
 Apollo himself. The other figure is clad with much 
 less splendour; at his back hangs loosely the petasus, 
 a broad-brimmed hat worn by hunters or shepherds 
 or wayfarers; in one hand he bears a long branch 
 of laurel, the symbol of the suppliant, in the other, 
 a drawn sword. This is Orestes, who has slain his 
 mother Clytaemnestra, the murderess of his father 
 Agamemnon, and has sought refuge with Apollo from 
 the pursuing Furies. A silent figure moves behind 
 these two; it is the god Hermes, carrying in his hand 
 the herald's staff, decked with white ribbons. Apollo 
 bids Hermes escort Orestes to Athens, to seek the 
 judgment of the goddess Athene. 
 
 20. The ghost of Clytaemnestra now moves into 
 the orchestra, and mounts the stage. She calls on the 
 sleeping Furies within, and then vanishes. They wake 
 to find Orestes gone, and dash on the stage in wild 
 rage — haggard forms with sable robes, snaky locks, 
 and blood-shot eyes. Apollo appears, and drives 
 them from his shrine. Now the scene changes to 
 Athens. Meanwhile the Furies have taken their station 
 as chorus in the orchestra, and, in grand choral songs, 
 declare their mission as Avengers of blood. Athene 
 assembles a Court of Athenians on the Hill of Ares, 
 (the real Hill of Ares was not half a mile off, on the 
 S.W. side of the Acropolis,) and thus founds the famous 
 Court of the Areopagus. The Furies arraign Orestes; 
 Apollo defends him. The votes of the judges are 
 equally divided. Athene's casting vote acquits Orestes. 
 The wrath of the Furies now threatens Athens. But 
 Athene at last prevails on them to accept a shrine 
 
80 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 in her land, — a cave beneath the Hill of Ares ; and 
 the play ends with this great reconciliation, as a 
 procession of torch-bearers escort the Furies to their 
 new home. 
 
 21. Thus a Greek tragedy could bring before a vast 
 Greek audience, in a grandly simple form, harmonized 
 by choral music and dance, the great figures of their 
 religious and civil history : the god Apollo in his tem- 
 ple at Delphi, the goddess Athene in the act of found- 
 ing the Court of the Areopagus, the Furies passing to 1 
 their shrine beneath the hill, the hero Orestes on his 
 trial. The picture had at once ideal beauty of the 
 highest kind and, for Greeks, a deep reality; they 
 seemed to be looking at the actual beginning of those 
 rites and usages which were most dear and sacred in 
 their daily life. 
 
 22. The tragedies of Aeschylus. — The great 
 artists of old Greece, who gave themselves wholly to 
 their art, were prolific : 70 tragedies, besides satyric 
 dramas, are ascribed to Aeschylus in the 40 years of 
 his poetical life; 113 to Sophocles; 92 to Euripides; 
 and to one tragic poet, who has left only fragments, no 
 less than 240. From Aeschylus we have only seven 
 tragedies left. The Persae, brought out in 472 B.C., is 
 a magnificent dramatic song of triumph for the victory 
 of Greece over the invading host of Persia. Aeschylus 
 had himself fought at Marathon, at Salamis, at Arte- 
 misium and at Plataea. The spirit of a soldier glows 
 in the splendid description of the battle of Salamis, 
 with that trumpet-call ringing above it, Go forth, sons 
 of the Greeks, free your country, free your children and 
 wives, and the shrines of your ancestral gods, and the 
 tombs of your fathers. Nor is a deep moral wanting ; 
 the spirit of Darius rises from the grave to tell the 
 nobles of Persia that, in this ruin, the gods are punish- 
 ing the insolence of Xerxes. 
 
 23. In the Seven against Thebes (46S B.C.) we 
 are shown how the inherited curse in the house of 
 
chap, i.] THE DRAMA. 81 
 
 Oedipus is visited on his sons Eteocles and Polyneices, 
 who slay each other in single combat when the Argives, 
 under Adrastus, besiege Thebes. Warriors splendid 
 in their panoply gleam, as it were, under a sky lurid 
 with the lightnings of angry gods. The Prometheus 
 Bound (of uncertain date, perhaps 472 — 468 B.C.) is 
 a sublime picture of the superhuman being who had 
 stolen fire from heaven, and taught the elements of 
 civilisation to men, chained to a cliff in the Caucasus 
 by command of Zeus, the new king of the gods. 
 Prometheus knows a secret on which the throne of 
 Zeus depends; but, amid his tortures, no threats will 
 make him utter it. As he speaks his last defiance, the 
 thunders of Zeus break forth, and the scene closes 
 with the crash of an appalling tempest. 
 
 24. The Suppliants (462 b.c) are the fifty daughters 
 of Danaus, who have fled with their father from 
 Egypt to Argos, in order to avoid marrying their first- 
 cousins, the fifty sons of Aegyptus. The Argive king 
 Pelasgus receives and protects them. The Agamem- 
 non, Choephori, and Eumenides, were the crown of the 
 poet's work. They were brought out at Athens in 
 458 b.c, two years before his death. In the Aga- 
 memnon, we have the return of the victorious king 
 from Troy to Mycenae, and his murder by Clytaem- 
 nestra. The Choephori, or ' offerers of libations,' are 
 Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, and her handmaids, 
 bringing offerings to her father's grave. Her prayer 
 is heard. Orestes returns to Mycenae, and slays 
 Clytaemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus. In the 
 Eumenides, as we have seen, Orestes is accused by 
 the Furies, defended by Apollo, and absolved by 
 Athene. 
 
 25. Religious and moral Ideas of Aeschy- 
 lus. — Aeschylus felt profoundly the seeming war of 
 principles in the moral government of the world. 
 When the wicked prospered and the guiltless suffered 
 others might be content to say, ' The god is a blind, 
 
82 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 malignant force.' Aeschylus strove to go farther back. 
 Somewhere, if we could only reach it, he felt, there is 
 a higher unity in which the seeming strife is resolved. 
 True, those bright gods of Olympus above, who send 
 us joy and health, who are so full of loving-kindness 
 and wise providence, seem to rule on different prin- 
 ciples from the dark, terrible gods of the nether world, 
 who send plague or famine to blight us, whose joy is 
 in drinking blood, who are the ministers of pain and 
 death. Yet let us look deeper, and we shall see that 
 both the gods of heaven and the gods infernal are 
 working out one law. That law is the law of righte- 
 ousness. A power above the gods themselves, even 
 Necessity, ordains that no offence against Righteous- 
 ness shall remain unpunished. 
 
 26. A man is very rich and great ; he grows ar- 
 rogant. The gods begin to be jealous of him. He 
 sins. The gods blind his heart. He goes on from 
 crime to crime. At last his measure is full. Fate 
 forges a sword and puts it into the hand of the 
 Fury; Justice gives the word; and the sinner is smit- 
 ten. Sometimes the enormous sin of the father is even 
 visited on his children. A curse descends from genera- 
 tion to generation. An Avenging Fury becomes the 
 silent inmate of the house. After long years, perhaps, 
 some act of insolence done by the inheritor of the 
 curse puts him in the Fury's grasp, and she claims 
 from him the whole debt. Thus the gods slowly teach 
 men that sin entails suffering. Even in sleep a re- 
 membrance of anguish is busy at the heart, painfully 
 instilling the lesson of virtue. Nay, the younger gods 
 themselves have been thus disciplined by Necessity. 
 Zeus, when he had overthrown an elder dynasty, at 
 first abused his power. But Necessity taught him that 
 he stood in need of wisdom, and must master, not by 
 violence, the secret of Prometheus. 
 
 Thus in Aeschylus we are led up to the mysterious 
 sources of divine and moral law. The war between the 
 
chap. I.] THE DRAMA. 83 
 
 gods of heaven and hell is found to be no longer im^ 
 placable, since both, constrained by Necessity and 
 aided by her daemonic ministers, are working in the 
 cause of Righteousness. 
 
 27. Aeschylus was the tragic poet of all Greece 
 rather than that of Athens alone. He had fought in 
 those great wars against Persia which had first made 
 the Greeks everywhere feel that they were one people ; 
 and in his poetry he spoke to all the Greeks alike. He 
 said that his plays were only morsels from Homer's 
 banquet ; and he is indeed the dramatist of that heroic 
 age in which the traditions of all the Greeks meet. His 
 heroes, as in the Iliad, stand above common humanity. 
 He has the true Homeric feeling for the majesty of 
 kings, whose sceptres are given to them by Zeus, and 
 who are royal even among the dead. After the Persian 
 wars, as Athens grew more democratic, it probably be- 
 came less congenial to Aeschylus. He may have felt, 
 too, after the victory of his younger rival Sophocles 
 in 468 B.C., that his poetry was ceasing to be in 
 sympathy with the rising generation. Much of his 
 later life was spent away from Athens, chiefly with 
 Hieron of Syracuse, whose foundation of Catana, about 
 476 B.C., he celebrated in a lost play, The Women of 
 Aetna. In his ILumenides we see his political feeling 
 towards the close of his life. He does honour to The- 
 seus, the hero of the old Athenian democracy. But he 
 warns the new democracy against enfeebling the con- 
 servative Areopagus, the 'safeguard of the city,' or 
 taking away its old right of watching over public 
 morals. Aeschylus died at Gela in Sicily, in 456 B.C., 
 aged 69. 
 
 28. Sophocles, son of Sophilus, was born proba- 
 bly in 495 B.C. His family belonged to the township of 
 Colonus, near Athens ; that Colonus where, in one of 
 his great tragedies, he makes the weary Oedipus find 
 rest, — where the nightingale haunts the green glades, 
 constant to the dark-veined ivy, — where narcissus and 
 
 8 
 
84 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 golden crocus bloom, where the springs of clear 
 water never fail; a region hallowed by the joyous 
 presence of the god Dionysus and loved by the 
 Muses. Sophocles was fifteen years of age when the 
 Greeks overthrew the Persians in the great sea-fight 
 at Salamis, and was chosen to lead the paean sung by 
 a chorus of boys before the trophy raised to com- 
 memorate that victory. He had lessons from the 
 famous musician Lamprus; and in 468, at the age of 
 twenty-seven, competed for the prize of tragedy against 
 Aeschylus, his elder by just thirty years. The house 
 was divided, we are told, on the merits of the rivals. 
 The presiding archon left the decision to Cimon, 
 who had just come back from his victories in Thrace, 
 and to the other nine generals. They gave the prize 
 to Sophocles. 
 
 29. From that time to his death he was the favourite 
 tragic poet of Athens. The first prize fell to him 
 no less than twenty times. The average merit of his 
 pieces, and of his competitors, may be judged from 
 the fact that Oedipus the King got only a second 
 prize. In 440 B.C., after his great triumph with the 
 Antigone, he was appointed one of the ten Generals 
 who, with Pericles, were to reduce the revolt of Samos, 
 — an instance of the public honour paid at Athens to 
 poetical genius, and, in this case, probably a sign of 
 general faith in the poet's practical gifts. The only 
 cloud on his long, brilliant life seems to have been a 
 transient one. His son Iophon, resenting the par- 
 tiality of Sophocles for a son and a grandson by a 
 second marriage, is said to have arraigned him before 
 their clansmen as being incapable of managing pro- 
 perty. Sophocles, the story adds, was content to dis- 
 prove his imbecility by reading the chorus from his 
 Oedipus at Co/onus, in which he praises his native place. 
 
 30. Genius, beauty of person, piety, a sweet nature, 
 and a happy fortune made Sophocles seem to the 
 Athenians a man loved by the gods. In his boyhood 
 
chap, i.] THE DRAMA. 85 
 
 he had sung the paean that was as a prelude to the 
 great career of Athens; and he died, in 405 B.C., just 
 before that career was. closed by the battle of Aegos- 
 potami. He has died 7vell, a poet wrote of him some 
 months later, having suffered no evil. And Aristophanes, 
 in a piece composed at the time, imagines Sophocles 
 in the underworld, standing aside from the noisy, 
 rivalries of the dead, — gentle in the shades, even as he 
 was gentle among us. 
 
 To be worshipped after death as a hero was nearly 
 the equivalent, in old Greece, for being canonized as 
 a saint. This worship the Athenians paid to Sopho- 
 cles, honouring his memory with yearly sacrifice. 
 
 31. In about 60 years, Sophocles wrote upwards of 
 100 plays, of which only seven remain. The play called 
 the Trachiniae or Women of Trachis, because these 
 form the chorus, tells how Deianeira, living at Trachis 
 in Thessaly, learns that Heracles has fallen in love 
 with Iole, and sends him a robe anointed with the 
 blood of the Centaur Nessus, knowing not that it is 
 aught but a harmless love-charm ; and how Heracles, 
 in mortal torment from the poison, bids his son Hyllus 
 take him to the top of Mount Oeta, and lay him on a 
 funeral pyre; and thence, 'wrapped in heavenly flame, 
 is gathered to the host of the gods.' It has been 
 doubted whether the play is by Sophocles, but ground- 
 lessly; if inferior to some of his plays, it is still one of 
 the finest and most dramatically constructed of extant 
 tragedies. The Ajax opens on the morning after Ajax 
 — in the frenzy with which Athene punished his pride, 
 — has butchered the cattle of the Greeks, thinking 
 that he was slaying the Greek chiefs who had slighted 
 him by giving the armour of Achilles to Odysseus. 
 When reason returns, he is overwhelmed with the 
 sense of dishonour, and kills himself. The Eleclra 
 shows us the vengeance taken by Orestes on his 
 mother Clytaemnestra and on Aegisthus, — the theme 
 treated in the Choephori of Aeschylus and the Electra 
 18* 
 
86 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 of Euripides; but has a clearer artistic unity than the 
 former, and more ideal beauty than the latter. 
 
 32. Oedipus the King is, in subtlety of structure, 
 the masterpiece among extant Greek plays. Oedipus, 
 the great, the wise, has delivered Thebes from the 
 Sphinx by guessing her riddle, has been raised, 
 though an alien, to the throne, and has married the 
 widow of the late King Laius. A pestilence comes 
 on the city; and when the Thebans ask the oracle at 
 Delphi how they can be healed, the god Apollo bids 
 them investigate and punish the murder of Laius, 
 who was slain on the road to Delphi. Oedipus takes 
 up the search with zeal. Step by step it is proved, first 
 that he himself was the unwitting murderer of Laius; 
 next, that he was the murdered man's son, and that, 
 therefore, his wife is his mother. In the frenzy of his 
 horror he puts out his own eyes. When the Oedipus at 
 Colonus opens, some years have passed. Oedipus has 
 been driven from Thebes by Creon, (now king) with 
 the consent of his own sons, Eteocles and Polyneices. 
 Attended by his daughters, Antigone and Ismene, he 
 finds an asylum at Athens with King Theseus; he 
 wins peace and pardon from the gods; and at last, 
 called by the voice of one unseen, he passes from 
 earth in strange wise, beheld of Theseus alone. 
 
 33. The Antigone is a yet later chapter in the story 
 of the house. The two sons of Oedipus, Polyneices, 
 the assailant of Thebes, and Eteocles, its champion, 
 have slain each other in single combat. Creon, 
 king of Thebes, has decreed that no one, on pain of 
 death, shall pay the rites of burial to Polyneices ; but 
 Antigone sets' the unwritten law of the gods above 
 the edict of man, and renders the last honours to 
 her brother's corpse, and is put to death by Creon; 
 whose son, the lover of Antigone, and that son's 
 mother, slay themselves, cursing him. 
 
 The scene of the Philoctetes (409 B.C.) is laid on 
 the desolate isle of Lemnos. Ten years ago, the 
 
chap, i.] THE DRAMA. 87 
 
 hero Philoctetes, suffering from a noisome wound in 
 the foot, was left there in his sleep by the Greeks, at 
 the instance of Odysseus, as they sailed against Troy ; 
 but now they need him, since he has the bow of 
 Heracles, by which alone — so say the gods — Troy 
 can be taken. Odysseus persuades Neoptolemus, the 
 son of Achilles, to help him in a base scheme for 
 seizing Philoctetes, or stealing his bow; the scheme 
 has succeeded, when the young man's better nature 
 revolts against it. If Philoctetes will not come with 
 them to Troy, Neoptolemus will not steal his bow. 
 At this moment, the divine Heracles himself appears ; 
 Philoctetes learns the health and glory that await him 
 at Troy ; and gladly obeys his summoners. 
 
 34. Aeschylus shows us grand heroic forms fulfil- 
 ling the doom appointed for them by awful supernatural 
 powers : Sophocles is preeminently the dramatist of 
 human character. He excels in delineating the great 
 primary emotions of our nature. The self-sacrificing 
 devotion of Antigone, the victory of youthful generosity 
 over youthful ambition in Neoptolemus, the bitter sense 
 of lost honour in Ajax, the horror in Oedipus of a sud- 
 den and overwhelming reverse, are exquisite studies of 
 the human soul to which the artist has given a typical 
 beauty — expressing what is essentially true in each, 
 marking by a thousand fine touches how intimately he 
 felt the nature which he was drawing, but never using 
 his subtle analysis for the sake of any momentary effect 
 which would mar the repose, disturb the symmetry and 
 clearness, of Tragedy as he conceived it — that is, as 
 a work which is a failure unless it has artistic breadth 
 and unity, and can bear to be viewed as we view 
 a temple or a group of sculpture, judging it to be 
 good, not because it has clever details, but because 
 it is beautiful as a whole. Sophocles believes in the 
 goodness of the divine agency that governs the world, 
 not because he fails to see any apparent contradic- 
 tions between his religion and the moral facts of life, 
 
88 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 nor because he can partly reconcile such conflicts, as 
 Aeschylus did, by belief in a Necessity which controls 
 even the caprices of the gods, but rather because 
 he finds a solution in the analysis of our own nature. 
 The deepest instincts of human nature itself, its affec- 
 tions, its pity, its terror, bear witness to the unity and 
 supremacy of an unwritten but eternal law of purity 
 which is always identical with the true will of the gods, 
 though not always in harmony with man's positive 
 interpretation of that will. 
 
 35. Historically, the plays of Sophocles have this 
 special interest, that they interpret, more spiritually 
 than anything else that we have, the higher moral and 
 mental side of the age of Pericles; they have its noble 
 tone of conciliation between sacred tradition and a 
 progressive culture, between authority and reason, be- 
 tween the letter and the spirit of religion. If Sophocles 
 has been, on the whole, less popular in the modern 
 world than either Aeschylus or Euripides, one reason 
 may be this — there is no other Greek poet whose 
 genius belongs so peculiarly to the best Greek time. 
 Aeschylus has an element of Hebrew grandeur, Euri- 
 pides has strong elements of modern pathos and 
 romance ; these things easily come home to us. But 
 in order fully to appreciate Sophocles, we must place 
 ourselves in sympathy with the Greek mind in its 
 most characteristic modes of thought and with the 
 Greek sense of beauty in its highest purity. 
 
 36. Euripides was born in 480 B.C., the year in 
 which the Greeks conquered the Persians at Salamis. 
 He was therefore forty-five years younger than Aeschy- 
 lus, and only fifteen years younger than Sophocles. But 
 Euripides is much further from both Aeschylus and 
 Sophocles than Sophocles is from Aeschylus. He 
 represents a new order of ideas and a different con- 
 ception of the dramatist's art. His father Mnesarchus, 
 who gave him a liberal education — not a very cheap 
 luxury at Athens — was probably of better birth and 
 
chap, i.] THE DRAMA. 89 
 
 fortune than is implied in the jests of Comedy about 
 the poet's mother Clito having been a herb-seller. The 
 young Euripides was meant at first to be a professional 
 athlete ; at seventeen he tried painting ; at twenty-five 
 he brought out his first tragedy. He was thirty-nine 
 before he gained the first prize; and during a poetical 
 career of nearly fifty years he gained it only five times 
 in all. 
 
 37. The comic poet Aristophanes lashed him with 
 unsparing mockery as an atheist, a quibbler, and a bad 
 artist. His domestic life seems to have been unhappy, 
 and his poetry contains many bitter sayings about 
 women, though few could express female emotion more 
 tenderly. The extreme democracy which set in during 
 the Peloponnesian War was not to his taste, and he 
 speaks of the small farmers, who keep clear of the 
 public assembly, as those 'who alone save the coun- 
 try.' Altogether it is not strange that he should have 
 left Athens about 409 B.C., and taken up his abode in 
 Macedonia with Archelaus, — a king whom he compli- 
 ments on putting down brigands, and who liked to 
 draw clever Greeks to his court. Here Euripides died 
 in 406, — a few months before Sophocles, who honoured 
 his brother poet's memory, in his next tragedy, by 
 forbidding the actors to wear crowns or splendid 
 dresses. 
 
 38. Of the 92 dramas that went under the name of 
 Euripides, 75 (including 8 satyr-plays) were thought 
 genuine by the old critics : we have 1 7. The 
 Alcestis, the oldest of these (438 B.C.), tells how 
 Alcestis died to save the life of her husband Ad- 
 metus, and was brought back from the grave by 
 Heracles. Medea (431 B.C.) is the princess of Colchis, 
 who for love of Jason has shown him how to win the 
 golden fleece, and has fled with him to his own land ; 
 but he has forsaken her for Glauce, daughter of Creon 
 king of Corinth. Medea, by her magic arts, destroys 
 his bride, slays the children whom she had borne to 
 
9© GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 Jason, and is carried through the air, in an en- 
 chanted car, to Athens. The Hippolytas (428 B.C.) — a 
 play which gained the first prize — tells how that son 
 of Theseus was cursed by his father, and perished, 
 when his stepmother Phaedra had falsely accused him 
 of assailing her honour ; and how Theseus, when his 
 son is dying before his eyes, learns the truth, too late, 
 from Artemis, the goddess of chastity. The play 
 alludes to the recent death of Pericles (429 b.c). 
 Racine used this plot in his Phedre. The Hecuba 
 (425 b.c.) sets forth the vengeance of the widowed 
 queen of Troy on Polymestor, who had slain her son 
 Polydorus and carried off her daughter Polyxena. 
 The Andromache (424 — 422 B.C. ?) turns on the for- 
 tunes of her who was once Hector's wife and is now 
 the captive of Neoptolemus, son of Achilles. It bears 
 the mark of the Peloponnesian War in a celebrated 
 invective against the Spartan character. 
 
 39. The Ion (424 — 421), one of the finest plays, 
 of which the scene is laid at Delphi, unfolds how Ion, 
 founder of the Ionian race and of the Attic tribes, was 
 in truth the son of Apollo by Creusa daughter of 
 Erectheus. The glow of feeling for Athenian glory 
 makes this play akin to the three next. We might 
 almost compare the group to those histories which 
 Shakspere dedicated to the glory of England before 
 he turned to the works of his ripest art. In the 
 Suppliants (420 — 417 b.c?) Athens appears as the 
 champion of humanity against Creon, king of Thebes, 
 who has refused burial to the Argive warriors slain 
 before its walls. So, too, in the Heracleidae (of like 
 date), Athens becomes a city of refuge to the children 
 of Heracles, persecuted by Eurystheus, once their 
 dead father's taskmaster. The Mad Heracles (420 — 
 417 b.c?) tells how Heracles, driven mad by his 
 enemy, the goddess Hera (Juno), murders his wife 
 Megara and his children, and on recovering his senses, 
 is going to kill himself; when king Theseus soothes 
 
chap i.] THE DRAMA. 91 
 
 his despair, and persuades him to seek grace and peace 
 at Athens. 
 
 40. Iphigenia among the Tauri, a very noble tragedy, 
 of uncertain date, belongs at least to the poet's later 
 period. The scene is laid at Balaclava in the Crimea. 
 Iphigenia, rescued by the miraculous intervention of 
 Artemis from the death to which her father had 
 doomed her, has become a priestess in the temple of 
 that goddess, where human victims are sacrificed. She 
 is called upon to immolate two strangers, when she 
 discovers them to be her brother Orestes and his friend 
 Pylades. She plans their escape ; and finally, by com- 
 mand of the goddess Athene, Thoas, the king of the 
 land, allows all three to go back to Greece, where 
 they found the worship of Artemis at Halae and 
 Brauron in Attica. The Troades (415 B.C.) is con- 
 cerned with the sorrows of noble Trojan dames, 
 Hecuba, Andromache, Cassandra, just after the fall of 
 Troy. The Helen (412 B.C.) turns on the story, made 
 popular by the lyric poet Stesichorus in his ' recanta- 
 tion,' that only a wraith of Helen went to Troy ; the 
 real Helen went to Egypt, and was rescued from its 
 king Theoclymenus by a trick of her disguised lord, 
 Menelaus. 
 
 41. The Phoenissae (411 B.C.) deals with the war 
 levied against Thebes by the Argives, in support of 
 the claim of Polyneices to the throne against that of 
 his brother Eteocles. The chorus consists of ' Phoe- 
 nician Maidens,' brought from Tyre to serve in the 
 temple of Apollo at Delphi, and detained at Thebes 
 by the outbreak of the war; probably Euripides 
 wished to vary from the 'Seven against Thebes' of 
 Aeschylus, in which the chorus is of Theban wo- 
 men. The Electra (410 B.C.), on the same theme 
 as the Choephori of Aeschylus and the Electra of 
 Sophocles, well illustrates the poet's manner. His Elec- 
 tra is a reduced gentlewoman, living in the cottage 
 of a worthy man with whom she has gone through the 
 
92 GREEK LITERATURE. [part II. 
 
 forms of marriage. In the Orestes (408 B.C.) Apollo 
 rescues Helen from the sword of Orestes, who has 
 gone mad after murdering his mother. 
 
 42. The Iphigenia at Aulis and the Bacchae were 
 brought out after the poet's death by his son, the younger 
 Euripides. The former shows how Iphigenia, doomed 
 by her father Agamemnon to be sacrificed at Aulis in 
 order that the wind might become fair for the Greek 
 fleet, was rescued by the goddess Artemis, who car- 
 ried the maiden off to her temple among the Tauri in 
 the Crimea. In the Bacchae ('female Bacchants'), 
 Pentheus, king of Thebes, arrests the disguised god 
 Dionysus, who has brought his wild bacchanal revelry 
 among the Thebans. But the god takes a terrible 
 vengeance. The king is rent in pieces by his own 
 mother Agave and her companions, in the frenzy of 
 their bacchant orgies. This wonderful tragedy has all 
 through it a flashing of divine light, a Dionysiac glory of 
 joy or terror, which is sometimes more oriental than 
 Greek. It was composed or finished in Macedonia — 
 in that northern region where the Thracian bacchants 
 were said to have rent Orpheus in pieces; and it has 
 the true fire of their worship. On that summer even- 
 ing in the Asiatic camp when the gory head of the 
 Roman Crassus was brought to the Parthian general's 
 tent, it was brought to the sound of the verses in 
 which the Agave of Euripides vaunts her ghastly 
 trophy. 
 
 43. The Cyclops is the only specimen of a satyr- 
 drama that we have. It turns on the adventure of 
 Odysseus with Polyphemus, and has a good deal of 
 rollicking buffoonery, but little wit, and is not too 
 short at 700 lines. The Bhesus, which used to be 
 attributed to Euripides, is now generally supposed to 
 be by some indifferent poet of the latest Attic time. 
 Its theme is the midnight raid of Odysseus and 
 Diomede on the tents of the Thracian Rhesus at Troy. 
 
 44. Euripides has been the most generally popu- 
 
chap, i.] THE DRAMA. 93 
 
 lar of the three tragedians ; his homeliness and his 
 unrestrained pathos bring him nearer to every-day 
 life. But in his hands Tragedy loses that ideal beauty 
 which Sophocles had raised to perfection. Euripides 
 cared less to make his play a harmonious whole. He 
 relied more on particular scenes or situations. As his 
 drama was less artistically planned, he was obliged to 
 help it out by mechanical devices. One of these was 
 a '■prologue'' in the special sense — a long set speech at 
 the opening of the piece, in which the actor gives a 
 sketch of the facts which it is needful for the spectators 
 to know. Another was the ' god from a machine,'— a 
 deity brought in suddenly to cut some knot in the 
 action. 'Sad Electra's poet,' as Milton called him, 
 excelled in pathetic power, and especially in expressing 
 the sorrow or tenderness of women ; though he never 
 drew a woman so noble or so nobly tender as the 
 Antigone of Sophocles. Kings and heroes in rags or 
 on crutches, heroes and heroines bathed in tears, 
 lamentations long drawn out, abound in his plays ; and 
 his skill in working on the feelings led Aristotle to call 
 him, not, indeed, the greatest dramatist, but ' the most 
 tragic ' of the poets. The songs of the Chorus in Euri- 
 pides have less to do with the action than in Aeschy- 
 lus or Sophocles ; and he made much use of lyric 
 monodies, plaintive or sentimental airs for one voice. 
 
 45. He was deeply influenced by Anaxagoras, who 
 taught that Intelligence (nous) is the supreme principle 
 by which matter has been reduced to order. Euripides 
 is sometimes inclined to identify Zeus with this Intelli- 
 gence. Sometimes he leans to pantheism, and makes 
 Zeus ' the vast aether that holds earth in his soft em- 
 brace.' But on one point he is clear : ' If the gods do 
 anything base, they are not gods.' Aristophanes most 
 unjustly said of him, 'he has brought men over to 
 believe that there are no gods.' Euripides was versed 
 in those new studies of rhetoric and logic which the 
 old school hated. He frequently mars his dialogue 
 
94 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 with rhetorical argument, but it was unfair to accuse 
 him of recommending dishonest casuistry. One of 
 his lines, for instance, was constantly quoted against 
 him : ' My tongue has sworn, but my mind is not 
 bound by the oath.' If, however, we look at the con- 
 text in the Hippolytus, we find the poet's meaning to 
 be that a man is not morally bound by a promise 
 extracted from him on false pretences. 
 
 Euripides was a great picturesque dramatist. In the 
 Bacchae he has given us a romantic drama of such 
 brilliant fancy as we find in no Greek poet except 
 Aristophanes, and the same, quality belongs in large 
 measure to the Ion. With this gift, and with his ten- 
 der pathos, he can never lose his charm for the modern 
 world. 
 
 46. Aeschylus first gained the tragic prize in 484, 
 Sophocles in 468, Euripides in 442. The great tragic 
 art of Athens was completely developed in less than 
 50 years. Similarly, in England, the space between 
 Marlowe's Tambur/aitie in 1587 and Ford's Per kin 
 Warbeck in 1634 saw the whole of a great dramatic 
 literature created. But, apart from the rapidity of the 
 growth, there are two things which distinguish Athe- 
 nian drama — its originality, and its marvellous fertility. 
 Drama has arisen spontaneously elsewhere, and not 
 among Indo-Europeans alone. The Chinese did not 
 borrow their drama. The cousins of the Greeks in 
 India created drama of high merit. But the Greeks 
 of Attica were the first people who made 
 drama a complete and beautiful work of art. 
 And the 31 tragedies which have been saved to us 
 are but a fraction of a vast literature. Many of the 
 best plays that we have were vanquished by rivals of 
 which the very names are lost. There must have 
 been many tragic poets who, in the estimation of 
 their contemporaries, were nearly on a par with the 
 great three ; Agathon, for instance, the friend of 
 Socrates and Plato, probably was so. 
 
chap, i.] THE DRAMA. 95 
 
 47. Comedy was twin-born with Tragedy; it 
 sprang from the same worship of Dionysus; but it 
 was later in reaching its maturity. A worship founded 
 on the personification of natural forces necessarily con- 
 secrates mirth as well as mourning, for it consists in 
 the impassioned observation of contrasts. If the dark- 
 ening of the year, the withering of the leaves, the 
 freezing of the earth, claim a sympathetic sorrow, then 
 a sympathetic joy must welcome the larger light of 
 spring, the sprouting of leaves, the ground newly clad 
 with grass and flowers. In Greek worship mysterious 
 awe and daring jest were often neighbours ; but in no 
 worship were they nearer to each other than in that 
 of Dionysus. Frolicsome banter, the outbreak of 
 animal spirits that have been repressed, fitly greet the 
 returning sunshine of the god's fortune as it breaks 
 through the passing cloud. 
 
 48. ' Comedy' ' the song of the village,' carries us 
 back to the gay vintage feast which the country people 
 kept with feasting and dancing, with song and jest. The 
 graver hymns sung at such festivals were taken up, we 
 saw, by Arion, arranged artistically for a regular chorus, 
 and thus made the germ of Tragedy. The light, 
 humorous songs — the pleasantry and burlesque — were 
 long left to be extemporised by the people. But these, 
 too, came to be set for a regular chorus, holding a dia- 
 logue with an actor on the stage. And here, too, the 
 first step was taken by the Dorians. But the Dorians, 
 who had a turn for broad drollery and homely satire, 
 went a step further in Comedy than in Tragedy. They 
 dramatised the dialogue of ' comic ' chorus and actor 
 into short farces. Susarion, who exhibited such farces 
 in Attica about 580 B.C., was a Dorian of Megara; and 
 it is noteworthy that in later days the Sicilian Megara, 
 a colony of its namesake in Greece Proper, was the 
 birthplace of the comic poet Epicharmus (450 B.C.). 
 There was a recognised type of Megarian farce. A 
 comic writer of about 480 b.c. says that he disdains 
 
 9 
 
96 GREEK LITER A TURE. [part ii. 
 
 to make his comedy Megarian ; and Aristophanes him- 
 self deprecates a joke stolen from Megara. These 
 Megarian farces — like those of the lively Sicilians — 
 probably abounded in broad fun, which the Athenian 
 sense of humour would have found tiresome. After 
 Susarion, we hear of no considerable comic poet till 
 the Attic Chionides, about 488 b.c. 
 
 49. Attic Comedy, in its artistic form, began 
 about 470 b.c. Aristophanes names Magnes as the 
 earliest of his predecessors, and describes how, with 
 all his versatility, he failed to keep the favour of 
 the fickle crowd. The first great name is Cratinus 
 (448 b.c), who 'was borne on a full tide of praise.' 
 Crates, nearly his contemporary, pleased Athens by 
 his glowing fancy and his 'most dainty conceits.' 
 Eupolis, whose first play was brought out in 429 B.C., 
 directed a satire as bitter, if not as witty, as that 
 of his rival Aristophanes against the vices of the 
 day. One of his best-known pieces was a savage 
 attack on a profligate set of which Alcibiades was the 
 centre. 
 
 50. Aristophanes was probably born about 
 448 B.C. His father Philippus owned property in 
 Aegina; and there is no reason to doubt the son's 
 claim to Athenian citizenship, though his enemy, the 
 demagogue Cleon, seems to have indicted him more 
 than once as a usurper of civic rights. He tells us 
 himself how fully he realised that careful preparation 
 was needful for a poet who wished to keep the favour of 
 Athens. He had seen his predecessors suffer from 
 the people's inconstancy. It was his maxim that one 
 should serve an apprenticeship as both oarsman and 
 steersman before one took command of a ship. But 
 when, at the early age of twenty-one, he did come 
 forward, he kept his place. 
 
 For nearly 40 years Aristophanes was the great 
 burlesque critic of Athenian life, political, intellectual, 
 moral and social. We have only n of the 54 come- 
 
chap. I.] THE DRAMA. 97 
 
 dies which he is said to have written, and these fall 
 into three groups. 
 
 51. The plays of the first group use unre- 
 stricted licence of satire. His career began with two 
 plays now lost; the Banqueters (427 B.C.), a contrast 
 between the Old School and the New; the Babylonians 
 (426 B.C.), a satire on the treatment of the allies of 
 Athens by the demagogues. Then came our Achar- 
 nians (425 B.C.)— a plea for the peace-party against 
 the war-party, the latter being represented by the 
 men of Achamae, whose vineyards have been 
 laid waste by the Peloponnesians. In the Knights 
 (424 B.C.) he continues his attack, begun in the 
 'Babylonians,' on the demagogue Cleon. No mask- 
 maker could be found to take the risk of caricaturing 
 Cleon; 'but you will know him,' says the poet, — 'the 
 house is clever.' In the Clouds (423 b. c.) he attacks 
 the new spirit of inquiry and culture. Physical philo- 
 sophers like Anaxagoras, teachers of rhetoric like 
 Protagoras, are classed together under the common 
 name of 'sophist;' and Socrates is taken as the type 
 of the whole tendency. In the Wasps (422 B.C.), on 
 which Racine founded Les Plaideurs, we are shown 
 how the demagogues treat their deluded allies, the 
 citizens who form the large juries in the law-courts. 
 The Peace (421 b.c.) resumes the purpose of the 
 ' Acharnians.' Trygaeus, a distressed Athenian, flies 
 up to heaven on a beetle, and there finds the 
 gods engaged in pounding the Greek States in a 
 mortar. He succeeds in liberating the goddess 
 Peace from her prison, and winning her blessings for 
 Greece. 
 
 52. The plays of the second group differ from 
 those of the first in the greater reserve with which 
 political satire is employed. In the Birds (414 B.C.), 
 two enterprising Athenians persuade the birds to build 
 a cloud-city by which the gods are cut off from men, 
 and so brought to terms. It is a medley of sportive 
 
98 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 fancies, full of allusions to the Athenian follies of the 
 day, and especially to the expedition against Sicily. 
 The Lysistrata appeared just before, the Thesmo- 
 phoriazusae just after, the reign of terror established 
 by the Four Hundred in 411 B.C. In the former, the 
 women seize the government, with a view to ending 
 the Peloponnesian War. In the latter, Euripides is 
 tried and condemned at the female festival of the 
 Thesmophoria. The Frogs (405) came out when 
 Athens was exhausted by her last effort in the war, — 
 a few months before her final defeat at Aegospotami. 
 Euripides and Sophocles had both recently died. 
 Euripides and Aeschylus are represented contending 
 for the tragic prize among the dead, and the prize is 
 won by Aeschylus. 
 
 53. The third group consists of two plays, in 
 which the old strain of personal satire has almost dis- 
 appeared. The Ecdesiazusae (392) shows how the 
 'Women in parliament' contrived to frame a new con- 
 stitution. The Plulus (388 B.C.) relates how eye-sight 
 was restored to the god of wealth, who proceeds to 
 enrich the good and beggar the wicked. 
 
 54. Spirit of the great Attic Comedy. — Attic 
 Comedy, as we have it in Aristophanes, is a public 
 commentary on the every-day life of Athens, in great 
 things and small. Politics and society, statesmen and 
 private persons, are criticised with unsparing freedom. 
 The satire is unscrupulously personal. Old Athens 
 knew no respect for private life when it seemed to 
 be for the good of the city that the vices of a citizen 
 should be lashed. At the carnival of Dionysus the 
 poet had, as it were, a public charter to speak his 
 whole mind to the citizens. Such a power was sure 
 to be sometimes abused, and the license of Comedy 
 was more than once restrained by legal enactment. 
 The special weapon of the old Attic Comedy was its 
 power of holding up a man or a policy to admiration 
 or ridicule before some 20,000 legislators. Broad as 
 
chap. I.] THE DRAMA. 99 
 
 the farce might be, the effect on public opinion was 
 Often, probably, very great. 
 
 55. The Chorus in Comedy consisted, not of 
 12 or 15 persons as in Tragedy, but usually of 24. 
 They were dressed as fantastically as the figures in a 
 modern pantomine or extravaganza. Thus, in the 
 ' Wasps] the Chorus were dressed to look as much as 
 possible like huge wasps, pinched at the waist and 
 armed with skewers for stings ; in the Birds, the 
 Chorus were gorgeously arrayed in 24 different kinds 
 of plumage. This burlesque element was quite in 
 keeping with the frolic of a Dionysiac festival. At 
 some point suited for a pause in the action — usually 
 towards the middle of the play — the Chorus faced 
 round towards the spectators, drawing nearer to them. 
 This was their parabasis, or 'coming forward' to the 
 house — a name given especially to the address which 
 the leader of the chorus then spoke, setting forth the 
 merits or grievances of the poet, or his views on public 
 affairs. These lines from the Peace 1 will give a notion 
 of the form and tone. Aristophanes is claiming to have 
 elevated Comedy : — 
 
 It was he that indignantly swept from the stage the paltry ignoble device 
 Of a Heracles needy and seedy and greedy, a vagabond sturdy and stout, 
 Now baking his bread, now swindling instead, now beaten and battered about. 
 And freedom he gave to the lacrimose slave who was wont with a howl to 
 
 rush in, 
 And all for the sake of a joke which they make on the wounds that disfigure 
 
 his skin,... 
 Such vulgar contemptible lumber at once he bade from the drama depart, 
 And then, like an edifice stately and grand, ht raised and ennobled the Art. 
 
 This interlude of the parabasis could be left out when 
 it did not suit the poet to speak his mind freely. Thus 
 the Lysistrata — on the eve of the Revolution of the 
 Four Hundred — has no parabasis. And as Comedy 
 lost its old audacity of political and personal satire, the 
 parabasis was dropped altogether. There is none in 
 the two latest plays of Aristophanes, the Ecclesiazusae 
 
 1 Translated by Mr Rogers. 
 
ioo GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 and the Plutus. In the Plutus, indeed, the Chorus 
 has no choral songs, but merely takes part in the 
 dialogue. 
 
 56. Aristophanes was not only a great satirist but 
 a great poet His comedies unite elements which 
 meet nowhere else in literature. There is a play of 
 fancy as extravagant as in a modern burlesque ; the 
 whole world is turned topsy-turvy ; gods and mortals 
 alike are whirled through the motley riot of one great 
 carnival. There is a humour as delicate, a literary 
 satire as keen, as the most exquisite wit could offer 
 to the most subtle appreciation. And there are lyric 
 strains of a wild woodland sweetness hardly to be 
 matched save in Shakspere. Aristophanes clung to 
 the old traditions of Athens with a sort of jovial, un- 
 reasoning toryism. Demagogues, philosophers, rhe- 
 toricians were his abomination. His ideal was the plain, 
 sturdy citizen of the good old school who beat the Per- 
 sians at Marathon. He claims for himself, and justly, 
 that he is outspoken on the side of virtue against vice. 
 But his personal judgments must be taken with reserve. 
 Thus, though an admirable critic, he was unfair to the 
 poet Euripides ; and he exaggerated the case against his 
 enemy, Cleon. 
 
 57. 'Old,' 'Middle,' 'New' Comedy.— The 
 Old, or great political, Comedy of Athens, lasted from 
 about 470 to 390 B.C., culminating and beginning to 
 
 * decline with Aristophanes. The Middle Comedy, 
 from about 390 to 320 B.C., marked the period of transi- 
 tion from political to purely social Comedy. It has no 
 longer the old boldness of fancy or bitterness of attack; 
 philosophy and literature are criticised rather than poli- 
 tics; the element of choral music disappears. Among 
 its poets were Antiphanes, reputed the author of 260 
 pieces, and Alexis, of 245 ; also two sons of Aristo- 
 phanes, Araros and Philippus. The New Comedy, 
 vigorous from about 320 to 250 B.C., was more like our 
 modern Comedy of manners. The stock characters 
 
chap, ii.] EARLY PROSE. HISTORY. lot 
 
 were such as the stern or weak father, the son whose 
 follies are seconded by a slave or a hungry parasite, the 
 pettifogger, active in stirring up lawsuits, and the gascon- 
 ading soldier of fortune. Such poets as Menander, 
 Philemon and Diphilus, appear to have excelled in 
 fine delineation of character. The Roman dramatists 
 imitated them. Julius Caesar called Terence ' a half 
 Menander ' — having his elegance of style, but not his 
 comic force. In speaking of 'Old,' 'Middle,' 'New' 
 Comedy, Ave must always remember that they are 
 merely successive phases of one unbroken devel- 
 opment, which followed necessarily on the decay 
 and final extinction of the old political life at Athens. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 BEGINNINGS OF PROSE LITERATURE. HISTORY. 
 
 Early Ionian prose-writers, 550 — 450 B.C. Herodotus, b. 484, 
 d. 428 bc, or later. Thucydides, b. 471, d. about 400. 
 Xenophon, b. about 431, d. 354. 
 
 i. Greek Poetry had matured its last great form in 
 the Attic drama before a true prose literature had 
 begun. The late origin of literary prose in Greece is 
 partly explained by the paramount interest which Epic 
 poetry so long secured for the legends of the heroic 
 past, and by the ease with which elegiac or iambic 
 verse subsequently responded to all the needs of 
 expression felt by a cultivated and thoughtful man. 
 In part it is also due to the fact that Greece was 
 broken up into small States, each busied with its 
 own affairs and its own traditions. Hence there 
 was no such national demand for a national record as 
 might have hastened the literary use of prose. Homer 
 19* 
 
102 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 was the national history. The Persian Wars first gave 
 to the Greeks a great theme of common interest. 
 
 The delay in the rise of prose literature was in one 
 way a gain. So much the wider and firmer became 
 that poetical basis on which the culture of the Greeks 
 reposed. The spiritual elevation, the true liberality, 
 the nobleness of conception which belonged to the best 
 Greek character are in some measure fruits of that long 
 sovereignty which great poetry had held over the race. 
 
 2, Earliest prose-writers. — Literary prose, 
 like artistic poetry, began in Ionia. About 550 B.C. 
 Pherecydes of Syros (who must be distinguished from 
 the annalist Pherecydes of Leros, 450 B.C.) set forth 
 his speculative theology in what is usually regarded as 
 the earliest Greek prose. The Ionian philosophers 
 Anaximenes and Anaximander also wrote in prose. 
 This earliest prose seems to have been in the form 
 of brief, sententious utterances, either disjointed or 
 roughly strung together, and analogous to the pithy 
 maxims ascribed to the ' wise men ' of the same age. 
 Thinkers who desired an artistic form for their thought 
 still preferred verse, as did the Ionian philosophers Xeno- 
 phanes and Parmenides, and the Sicilian Empedocles 
 in his great poem ' On Nature.' 
 
 3. Towards the end of the 6th century B.C. prose 
 began to be used with more freedom by those Ionian 
 writers who were especially called logographi, ' nar- 
 rators in prose,' as opposed to epopoii, 'narrators 
 in verse.' These writers had two chief branches of 
 work. (1) They compiled the ancient myths or legends 
 of Greece, and especially the genealogies of the great 
 houses. (2) They combined geography with uncritical 
 and fragmentary history in the description of foreign 
 countries, usually after personal travel. Essays in both 
 kinds were often made by the same writer, as by 
 Hecataeus of Miletus (500 B.C.), who wrote a Tour 
 of the Earth, and also Genealogies, in which he show- 
 ed how he himself had had a god for his sixteenth 
 
 
chap, ii.] EARLY PROSE. HISTORY. 103 
 
 ancestor. Hellanicus of Mitylene (450 B.C.) marks 
 the transition from mere compilation to more careful 
 work. He wrote a history of Attica, of many other 
 places in Greece, and of Egypt, Persia, Phoenicia; 
 and seems to have been among the first who at- 
 tempted a critical comparison of authorities. 
 
 4. Herodotus, son of Lyxes, was born in 484 B.C. 
 at Halicarnassus in Caria. This city was Dorian, but 
 had a large Ionian element in its population. The 
 family of Herodotus, a noble one, was probably 
 Dorian ; but he may have been familiar with the 
 Ionic dialect from his youth. At the time of his 
 birth the city was governed, under Persia, by Arte- 
 misia, the queen who fought so bravely for Xerxes at 
 Salamis. Her grandson and successor Lygdamis put 
 to death Panyasis, the maternal uncle of Herodotus, — 
 a man known in literature as one of the restorers of 
 epic poetry. Herodotus, we are told, fled from Lyg- 
 damis to the Ionian island of Samos ; returned to 
 Halicarnassus after the tyrant had been driven out ; 
 but again left his native place, and came to Athens 
 about 446 b. c. Athenian power, art and poetry were 
 then at their height under Pericles. Herodotus came 
 at Athens into a society as variously brilliant as the 
 world has ever seen. He was the intimate friend of 
 the poet Sophocles; and we have the beginning of 
 an ode said to have been addressed to him by Sopho- 
 cles in 440 B.C., — the year of the Antigone, a play 
 in which Sophocles alludes to a story told by Hero- 
 dotus in his third book. In 443, probably, Herodotus 
 went to Thurii, a colony founded by Athens on the 
 site of Sybaris in South Italy. He visited Athens 
 again, later than 432, for he saw the Propylaea or 
 colonnaded entrance of the Acropolis, completed in 
 that year. His death, probably at Thurii, is placed by 
 some as early as 428 b. c, since there are signs that 
 he did not live to revise his History ; by others, as late 
 as 406. 
 
104 GREEK LrrERATURE. [part n. 
 
 5. The travels of Herodotus, made chiefly from 
 Halicarnassus in the earlier half of his life, were ex- 
 tensive. Favoured by his two-fold quality as a Persian 
 subject and a Greek citizen, he traversed almost the 
 whole of the known world, from Ecbatana, Susa and 
 Babylon in the east to South Italy in the west, from 
 the northern shores of the Black Sea to the first 
 cataract of the Nile, an area of about 1700 square 
 miles. No Greek before him had explored foreign 
 lands so widely or so intelligently. 
 
 6. The History of Herodotus works up the 
 materials thus collected into an artistic picture of the 
 world, grouped round a central idea. This idea is the 
 great struggle between East and West, between Asiatic 
 and Greek, of which the Persian Wars formed the last 
 chapter. The History falls into two chief parts. The 
 first five books are an introduction, tracing the rise 
 and growth of the Persian power. The last four books 
 relate the Persian invasions of Greece under Darius 
 and Xerxes. 
 
 Book 1. contains the career of Cyrus, founder of the 
 Persian Empire (560 — 5 29 B.C.). Books 11. and in. 
 contain the invasion and conquest of Egypt by 
 Cambyses, his death, and the accession of Darius, 
 with a description of Egypt and the Egyptians. Books 
 iv. and v. contain the Persian campaigns in Scythia 
 and Thrace, with descriptions of the countries ; a 
 Persian expedition to Libya, with notices of that land 
 and its Greek colonists ; and the story of the Ionian 
 revolt from 501 to 498 b.c. 
 
 . Book vi., after concluding the Ionian revolt, re- 
 lates the first Persian expedition against Greece in 492, 
 and the invasion of 490, repelled at Marathon. Book 
 vii. relates the invasion of Xerxes, to the battle of 
 Thermopylae (480 b. c); Book vin., the battles of Arte- 
 misium and Salamis, and the flight of Xerxes (480) ; 
 Book ix., the battles of Plataea and Mycale (479), the 
 retreat of the Persian general Mardonius (479 B.C.), 
 
chap, ii.] EARLY PROSE. HISTORY. 105 
 
 and the capture by the Greeks of Sestos on the 
 Hellespont. 
 
 7. The god loves to cut down all toiuering things... 
 the god suffers none but himself to be haughty. Rash 
 haste ever goes before a fall ; but self-restraint brings 
 blessings, not seen at the moment perhaps, yet found out 
 in due time. These are the words that Herodotus 
 makes the wise Artabanus speak to his nephew, 
 Xerxes, king of Persia, dissuading him from the attack 
 on Greece ; but Xerxes answers him with insult. 
 They are the key-note of the History. It is a prose 
 tragedy, which justifies the ways of Heaven to men 
 by showing how sin is punished with ruin. According 
 to the best accounts, says Herodotus, the quarrel 
 between barbarian and Greek began by Phoenician 
 sailors carrying off the maiden Io from Argos. Greeks 
 retaliated by carrying off Europe from Tyre. Then 
 Greeks began wrong anew by taking Medea from 
 Colchis; and next the Phrygian Paris robbed the 
 Spartan king of Helen. The Greeks sacked Troy. 
 Ages passed before a strong champion of Asia arose. 
 And, when he came, his spirit was hateful to Heaven. 
 Xerxes was the type of the man whom the gods love 
 to humble, — the lord of all pleasure, all pomp, all 
 power, one whom men revere as a god and who treats 
 men as slaves. From Susa to the Hellespont, from 
 the Hellespont to the Gates of Greece, he moves on 
 with his countless host. He is mad with pride. He 
 sends his spoilers against Delphi. But the god himself 
 beats them back. He takes Athens. But dark signs 
 hint that the gods of Athens and Eleusis are against 
 him. And now his cup is full. Salamis — Plataea — 
 Mycale — these three defeats are the three falls which 
 Greece gave to Persia, freedom to slavery, the justice 
 of the gods to mortal pride. 
 
 8. The originality of Herodotus fairly entitles him 
 to be called, in one sense, the 'father of History.' 
 He has, of course, some general traits in common with 
 
io6 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 the Ionian writers of his own or an earlier day. Like 
 them, he records myths, though seldom quite uncriti- 
 cally; he describes foreign countries geographically 
 and socially ; and he writes in that Ionic dialect 
 which was then the recognised organ of literary prose. 
 He made direct use, too, of some earlier writers, such 
 as Hecataeus and Hellanicus. But no one before him 
 had worked large masses of facts into a symmetrical 
 whole, with unity of plan and thought. He was the 
 first artist in prose. As a historian, he fails 
 chiefly by inattention or insensibility to political cause 
 and effect. He will account for a great event merely 
 by some accident which was the immediate occasion 
 of it, without seeking to find any deeper source. And 
 he tells us little or nothing about constitutional change. 
 His charm of style is all the greater for his almost 
 child-like simplicity, and he is one of the most delight- 
 ful story-tellers. His narrative flows on in what the 
 Greeks called the running style, seldom attempting 
 compact periods. Often he stops to tell some quaint 
 little story by the way — like that of Hippocleides, 
 a noble suitor for the daughter of the great prince 
 Cleisthenes, who pained his intended father-in-law by 
 dancing before the company, and finally stood upon his 
 head. Cleisthenes, who had hitherto restrained him- 
 self, exclaimed, — ' Son of Tisandrus, you have danced 
 off the marriage'; but Hippocleides replied, Hippo- 
 cleides does not care. Hence, says Herodotus, our pro- 
 verb. 
 
 9. Thucydides, born in 471 B.C., was the son of 
 Olorus, an Athenian citizen. This Olorus was pro- 
 bably grandson of the Thracian prince Olorus, whose 
 daughter Hegesipyle married Miltiades, the conqueror 
 at Marathon. Thucydides would thus be a younger 
 cousin of the statesman Cimon. He was forty years 
 of age when the Peloponnesian War began in 431. 
 From its beginning, he tells us, he foresaw that it was 
 destined to be more momentous than any war before 
 
chap, ii.] EARLY PROSE. HISTORY. 107 
 
 it, and watched its course closely, with a view to 
 writing its history. The turning-point of his life came 
 in 424 B.C., the eighth year of the war. He was then 
 in command of an Athenian fleet off the Thracian 
 coast. On this coast, opposite the island of Thasos, 
 Thucydides possessed a property of gold-mines. While 
 Thucydides was at ^Thasos with his ships, the Spartan 
 general Brasidas surprised Amphipolis on the Strymon, 
 the chief town held by Athens in those parts. It was 
 a terrible disaster. The Athenians deprived Thucy- 
 dides of his command. There is no ground for 
 charging him with anything so base as the wish to 
 guard his own estate at the cost of his duty. But 
 it seems difficult to excuse him for having been 50 
 miles from Amphipolis at a time when Brasidas was 
 hovering about it. We do not know that he was 
 banished. But we know that from 423 to 403 he was 
 in exile from Athens. He spent these 20 years partly 
 on his property in Thrace, partly among the Pelo- 
 ponnesians and their allies, — always keeping in mind 
 his great purpose, to write the history of the war. 
 He returned to Athens on the restoration of the de- 
 mocracy in 403 B.C. His death cannot have been 
 later than 396, and may probably be placed about 
 400. According to a contemporary account, he was 
 assassinated in Thrace ; his ashes were brought to 
 Athens, and laid in the tomb of the house of Cimon. 
 
 10. The History of Thucydides falls into three 
 parts, of which the last is unfinished. 1. The first 
 four Books, with chapters 1 — 18 of Book v., contain 
 the history of the war from its beginning in 43 1 to the 
 Peace of Nicias in 421 : sometimes called the 'Archi- 
 damian War,' from the invasions of Attica led by Archi- 
 damus king of Sparta. 2. In Book v. (from chapter 19), 
 Books vi. and vn., we have the next eight years, com- 
 prising that war in the Peloponnesus of which Argos 
 was the centre, and the Athenian expedition against 
 Sicily. 3. Book vin. begins the third chapter of the 
 
 10 
 
i08 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 struggle, called the Decelean War, from the Spartan 
 occupation of Decelea in Attica (413 B.C.). It would 
 naturally go down to the battle of Aegospotami (405), 
 or the surrender of Athens to Lysander (404). But 
 Book viii. breaks off in the middle of chapter 109, 
 shortly after the great victory of the Athenians (in 411 
 B.C.) at Cynossema. Alleged differences of style, and 
 the absence of set speeches, have brought suspicion on 
 the eighth Book; but there can be little doubt that 
 it is the unfinished work of Thucydides. 
 
 1 1. Herodotus was the literary founder of History ; 
 Thucydides was the first philosopher of History. 
 He seeks not only to give an accurate, concise nar- 
 rative of events, but also to show the causes from 
 which the events sprang, the political or moral lessons 
 which they convey. Thus he is not content with 
 saying that the Peloponnesian War arose from the 
 disputes between Athens and Corinth about Epi- 
 damnus and Potidaea. He goes back beyond these 
 immediate and obvious causes to deeper, more es- 
 sential causes — the fear which the empire of Athens 
 had spread throughout Greece, and the impulse of 
 Sparta to come forward as the champion of Greek 
 freedom against Athenian aggression. When he has 
 given, in a few bold touches, a picture of the strife 
 between oligarchs and democrats at Corcyra, he ana- 
 lyses the state of political morals out of which the 
 strife arose. A passionless, judicial tone prevails 
 throughout. He seldom awards personal praise or 
 blame. The absence of romance in my History, he says, 
 will perhaps lose it the popular ear. But it will be enough 
 if it is judged useful by those who may desire an accurate 
 knowledge of the past as a clue to that future which, in all 
 human probability, must repeat or resemble the past. It 
 has been composed, not as the exploit of an hour, but as 
 a possession for all time. 
 
 12. And such it truly is; Thucydides has well 
 been called 'the historian of our common humanity, 
 
chap. II.] EARLY PROSE. HISTORY. 109 
 
 the teacher of abstract political wisdom.' The literary 
 characteristics of his work are also striking. Much of 
 the closest thought is conveyed in set speeches, put 
 into the mouths of the historical persons. Some of 
 these speeches represent the general purport of 
 speeches actually made. Others are altogether the 
 invention of Thucydides. But the thoughts and senti- 
 ments are always such as, in the judgment of Thucy- 
 dides, the particular speaker might have expressed. 
 The longest and most elaborate speech is the Funeral 
 Oration spoken by Pericles over those who fell in the 
 first year of the war — a magnificent picture of the 
 Athenian spirit in politics and in social intercourse. 
 Like the other speeches, it is an essay by Thucydides 
 himself in the fashionable rhetoric of the day, which 
 was somewhat stiff, and too fond of verbal contrasts, 
 but capable both of grandeur and of pathos. 
 
 13. A greater master of stern pathos than Thucy- 
 dides never lived, and this is partly because he never 
 says too much. He was not only a political philo- 
 sopher, but also an artist who felt the tragic force of 
 his story. Thus he fixes our attention on Athens at 
 the summit of her cruelty and insolence — in the mas- 
 sacre at Melos — just before he passes to the terrible 
 narrative of her ruin in Sicily. His style has many 
 faults. It is often involved, abrupt, obscure. But no 
 writer has grander bursts of rugged eloquence, or more 
 of that greatness which is given by sustained intensity 
 of noble thought and feeling. 
 
 14. Xenophon, through his own writings, is 
 better known to us as a man than almost any Greek 
 author. The story that Socrates saved his life at the 
 battle of Delium (424 B.C.) has caused his birth to be 
 dated about 445 B.C. ' But the story is probably a 
 fiction. From his own words it seems clear that he 
 cannot have been more than about thirty in 401. His 
 brother Gryllus was an Athenian citizen of good 
 position, and gave him a liberal education. He 
 
no GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 became the disciple of Socrates, whose teaching was 
 the basis of his principles throughout life. In the 
 spring of 401 B.C., at the advice of his Boeotian friend 
 Proxenus, he went to Sardis in Asia Minor, and joined 
 an expedition, including more than 10,000 Greek 
 mercenaries, which the young Persian prince Cyrus 
 was preparing to lead into Persia, for the purpose of 
 wresting the crown from his elder brother Arta- 
 xerxes II. 
 
 15. Xenophon has told the story of this expe- 
 dition in one of the most fascinating books in the 
 world, his Anabasis, in seven books. The title means 
 'a march up {from the coast)' into the interior, and 
 properly applies only to the first part, as far as the 
 battle at Cunaxa (a name not mentioned by Xeno- 
 phon, but given by Plutarch) about 50 miles from 
 Babylon, where Cyrus was killed (Sept. 401). The 
 remaining and larger part of the work ought rather to 
 be called Catabasis, the march doiu7i to the sea. Soon 
 after the death of Cyrus, the Persian satrap Tissaphernes 
 treacherously seized five of the Greek generals. The 
 Greeks were now in terrible danger. That night Xeno- 
 phon — who had not hitherto been either an officer or a 
 private soldier, but simply an 'unattached' volunteer — 
 dreamed that his father's house was set on fire by 
 lightning. What did this portend ? That the king of 
 Persia — figured by the King of Heaven — was to de- 
 stroy them ? Or, that, in their dark hour, a great light 
 was to come to them from on high? Xenophon 
 started up, awoke the surviving leaders, and in a mid- 
 night council of war, gave them heart, by his plain 
 earnest eloquence, to take measures for the common 
 safety. 
 
 16. Next day, formed in a hollow square with 
 the baggage in the centre, they began the Retreat. 
 Moving along the Tigris, past the site of the ancient 
 Nineveh and the modern Mossul, they came into 
 the country of the Carduchi, or Kurds, who, like 
 
chap. II.] EARLY PROSE. HISTORY. Ill 
 
 modern Kurds, rolled down stones on them from the 
 top of their mountain-passes ; then through Armenia 
 and Georgia. At last one day — in the fifth month — 
 February, 400 b.c. — Xenophon, who was with the rear- 
 guard, heard a great shouting among the men who 
 had reached the top of a hill in front. He thought 
 they saw an enemy. He mounted his horse, and 
 galloped forward with some cavalry. As they came 
 nearer, they could make out the shout: it was i the sea! 
 the sea!' There, far off, was the silver gleam of the 
 Euxine. After the long, intense strain of toil and 
 danger, the men burst into tears; like true Greek 
 children of the sea they knew now that they were in 
 sight of home. Two days' march brought them to 
 the coast at Trapezus, a Greek city, the modern Tre- 
 bizond; there they sacrificed to the gods, especially 
 to Zeus the Preserver and Heracles the Guide. This 
 Retreat showed Greece how weak Persia really was, 
 and encouraged the expedition of Alexander. In 
 Xenophon's phrase, they had mocked the Great King 
 at his own doors. 
 
 17. From Trebizond the Greeks, now reduced to 
 about 8600, gradually made their way to Byzantium 
 (Constantinople). After two months' service with 
 Seuthes, a Thracian prince, the remnant of 6,000 
 were incorporated, at Pergamus in the Troad, with 
 the army of the Lacedaemonian general Thimbron, 
 who was making war on the Persian satraps Tissa- 
 phernes and Pharnabazus. Xenophon then left them in 
 March, 399 b.c. This was the year in which Socrates 
 was put to death, — a crime by which Xenophon, already 
 unfriendly to the Athenian democracy, was further 
 embittered against Athens. He served in Asia under 
 his favourite hero, the Spartan king Agesilaus, and 
 fought under him against the Athenians and Thebans 
 at the battle of Coronea in 394. 
 
 18. Then, if not earlier, he was formally banished 
 from Athens. The Spartans rewarded him with the 
 
112 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n 
 
 gift of an estate at Scillus, a village about two miles 
 from Olympia, in Elis, where, with his wife and two 
 sons, he lived a happy country life for about twenty 
 years, busied with writing and hunting. After the 
 great defeat of Sparta at the battle of Leuctra in 
 371 B.C. he is said to have been driven from Scillus 
 and to have settled at Corinth. We hear that the 
 Athenians revoked his sentence of banishment, per- 
 haps in tribute to the bravery of his son Gryllus, who 
 fell on the Athenian side at Mantinea, in 362 B.c. 
 Xenophon died about 354 b.c. 
 
 19. Besides the Anabasis — which he did not pub- 
 lish in his own name, but in that of Themistogenes, a 
 Syracusan — his chief historical work is the Hellenica, 
 a history of Greece in seven books, beginning in 410 B.C., 
 soon after the battle of Cynossema in 411, and ending 
 with the battle of Mantinea in 362 b.c The first two 
 Books were probably composed not later than 400 b. c, 
 in continuation of the unfinished work of Thucydides, 
 and differ much from the last five books both in ex- 
 pression and in tone of thought. It is a dry history, 
 enlivened occasionally by short speeches or conversa- 
 tions, but disfigured by the author's prejudices in favour 
 of Sparta, and by a jealous idolatry of Agesilaus which 
 makes him keep other men in the background. Xeno- 
 phon relates the first Theban invasion of the Pelopon- 
 nesus without telling us that Epameinondas founded 
 Megalopolis and restored Messene ; and he relates the 
 revolution at Thebes without naming Pelopidas. Yet, 
 with all its faults, the work is precious as our chief 
 continuous authority for the history of the Spartan and 
 Theban supremacies. 
 
 20. In the Recollections of Socrates Xeno- 
 phon seeks to vindicate the teaching of his master from 
 the vulgar charges of impiety or immorality, and to 
 illustrate it by anecdotes of his life and conversation. 
 His Socrates has not the delicate irony of Plato's 
 Socrates, and it may be doubted whether Xenophon 
 
chap, ii.] EARLY PROSE. HISTORY. 113 
 
 always caught the real drift of the master; but the 
 book is interesting, not only because it preserves many 
 genuine traits and sayings, but also as showing how 
 Socrates impressed a thoroughly practical, rather blunt 
 mind. In the Treatise On Domestic Economy (Oeco- 
 fiomiciis), Socrates relates how a model Athenian hus- 
 band had given him his views on the proper way of edu- 
 cating a young wife who, when she married at the age 
 of fifteen, understood nothing but cookery. Nothing 
 is said about intellectual training; but the virtues of a 
 good wife and husband are agreeably drawn. The 
 Banquet — written probably before Plato's dialogue 
 of the same name — is an interesting picture of an 
 Athenian supper-party, enlivened partly by a profes- 
 sional juggler's troupe, partly by conversation — espe- 
 cially by the discourse of Socrates on the heavenly 
 and the earthly Love. The Defence 0/ Socrates on his 
 trial, which bears Xenophon's name, is probably a 
 scholastic exercise of later date. 
 
 2T. The Cyropaedia, or 'Education of Cyrus,' 
 is a sort of historical romance in eight books, de- 
 scribing how Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire 
 (who died in 529 B.C., and who must not be con- 
 founded with the young Cyrus of the Anabasis, killed 
 in 401 B.C.), was educated, how he distinguished him- 
 self as statesman, general and king, and how, on his 
 death-bed, he gave counsel to his sons and ministers. 
 The work is not historically accurate, nor is it a true 
 picture of Persian thought or manners, but rather an 
 encomium on Socratic principles and Spartan practice, 
 in which Cyrus himself — drawn with some touches 
 from the young Cyrus whom Xenophon had known — 
 is half a Socrates and half an Agesilaus. The story of 
 the Assyrian prince Abradates, whose beautiful wife 
 Panthea killed herself when he fell fighting for her 
 chivalrous captor, Cyrus, is the earliest prose love- 
 story in European literature. An instance of the 
 Socratic tone is the story of Cyrus being chastised by 
 
H4 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 his tutor for confirming the act of the big boy with 
 the small coat who had forced the little boy with the 
 large coat to an exchange. 
 
 22. The Hiero is a dialogue in which Hiero II., 
 tyrant of Syracuse, envies the blessedness of a private 
 station, and the poet Simonides paints the possible 
 beneficence of a despot. The essay On the Lacedae- 
 monian Polity commends especially the hardy train- 
 ing of Spartan citizens by the State. The essay On 
 the Athenian Polity is not by Xenophon, but was 
 written, with oligarchic sympathies, about 420 B.C. 
 It is thus the oldest extant specimen of literary 
 Attic prose. The treatise On the Revenues of Athens 
 suggests how they may be enlarged, as by increasing 
 the number of the tax-paying resident aliens, or farm- 
 ing out 10,000 slaves to work the silver-mines at 
 Laurium. It is probably not by Xenophon, but was* 
 written about 346 b. c. in the interest of the Athenian 
 party who held that peace with Philip would ensure 
 the commercial prosperity of the city. 
 
 23. The essay On Horsemanship gives hints on the 
 choice and the care of horses — especially as to harden- 
 ing the feet (the Greeks did not shoe their horses 
 with iron) ; and on the difficult art of mounting (they 
 had no stirrups). The Hipparchicus ; or ' Cavalry Offi- 
 cer's Manual,' shows the petty scale and crude tactics 
 of warfare. . The essay On Hunting deals largely with 
 hare-hunting on foot : there is a rather unsportsman- 
 like eagerness to kill by any means, but also some 
 real interest in the working of the dogs. Xenophon 
 is not a great artist, but an excellent writer of varied 
 information, whose large knowledge of the world 
 usually saves his prejudices from overpowering his 
 common sense. He is the earliest essayist; and 
 curious as a partisan of Sparta who owes his distinctive 
 merits to Athens. 
 
 24. Ctesias of Cnidus, who lived (415 — 398 
 B.C.) as physician at the court of Artaxerxes Mnemon, 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 115 
 
 became the Greek founder of oriental history by his 
 works, written in Ionic Greek, on Persia and India. 
 Only fragments remain. The application of lite- 
 rary rhetoric to history began in the school of 
 Isocrates, and was best represented by two of his 
 pupils. Theopompus (352 b. c.) continued the his- 
 tory of Thucydides to the battle of Cnidus (394 B.C.), 
 and in his Philippica made Philip of Macedon the 
 central figure in a picture of Greek civilisation. 
 Ephorus wrote a history of Greece from the Return 
 of the Heracleidae to Philip's siege of Perinthus (340 
 B.C.). Attic history and archaeology were treated in 
 special works called Atthides by several writers from 
 Cleidemus (360 B.C.) onwards. The chief Atthis of 
 which fragments remain is that of Philochorus, who 
 lived about 306 — 260 B.C., and carried his history 
 down to 262 b.c. 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 
 
 Oratory. Antiphon b. 480, d. 411 B.C. Andocides, flor. 
 415 — 390- Lysias, master of the plain style of oratory, flor. 
 403 —381- Isocrates, founder of literary rhetorical prose, 
 b. 436. d. 338- Isaeus, the master of forensic argument, 
 flor. 390—353- Demosthenes, b. 384, d. 322- His con- 
 temporaries : Aeschines, Lycurgus, Hypereides, Deinarchus, 
 Demades. — Decline of oratory begins with Demetrius Pha- 
 lereus, flor. 318 B.C. 
 
 Philosophy. Plato, b. 429, d. 347- Aristotle, b. 384, d. 322- 
 Minor Socratic schools : — Megarics, Cynics, Cyrenaics. — 
 Beginning of 3rd century B. c. : Epicureans ; Stoics. 
 
 i. The development of Attic prose is seen most 
 clearly in the history of Attic oratory. All the Greek 
 poetry and prose of the earlier classical age was meant, 
 in some measure, to be heard as well as read. The 
 Greek ear was accustomed to look for musical rhythm 
 
Il6 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 and finished expression in prose as well as in verse. 
 Public speaking, too, was cultivated as a fine art. It 
 was indispensable to a citizen who wished to make his 
 mark in the public Assembly, or who had to defend 
 himself before a law-court. Greek audiences criticised 
 the style of a speech 'much as we criticise the style of a 
 book. Hence oratorical prose had a direct and vital 
 bearing on Attic prose generally. 
 
 2. Two chief influences combined to form the 
 earliest style of Attic prose, (i) One was that of the 
 Sophists, teachers who undertook to prepare young 
 men for the career of active citizens by training them to 
 readiness in speech and argument, and who brought in 
 a superficial logic and grammar. The word 'sophist' 
 (' professor of learning or wisdom ') was used almost as 
 vaguely as the phrase ' man of letters,' and could be 
 applied without any bad sense to such a man as Plato. 
 Isocrates accepted the name, though he distinguished 
 himself from ' sophists of the herd.' But the ' sophists,' 
 as a class of teachers, got a bad name partly from plain 
 men of the old school who feared their subtlety, 
 partly from philosophers who despised their shallowness. 
 Protagoras and Prodicus were two of the chief 
 'sophists.' (2) The other influence was that of the 
 Sicilian Rhetoric. Corax of Syracuse invented his 
 ' Art of Words ' (466 b. c.) to help people in pleading 
 their cases before law-courts; it was developed by his 
 disciple Tisias, through whom it came to Athens. 
 The Sicilians were a lively people, in some things like 
 the Athenians and in others like the Irish — fond of 
 discussion, quick in repartee, and ' never so wretched 
 that they could not make a joke.' 
 
 3. Gorgias of Leontini in Sicily was neither a 
 'sophist' in the proper sense nor a student of rhetoric 
 as an art, but rather an independent cultivator of 
 natural oratory, with a gift for brilliant expression of 
 a poetical and often turgid kind. When he visited 
 Athens in 427 b.c. his florid eloquence became the 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 117 
 
 rage, and was afterwards the first literary inspiration 
 of the orator Isocrates. 
 
 4. Antiphon (born 480 B.C.), the first in the list 
 of the Ten Attic Orators drawn up by later Greek 
 critics, has much in common with the style of Thucy- 
 dides, and, with him, represents the early Attic 
 prose. The style is elaborate ; it moves with a grave 
 dignity ; much weight of meaning is concentrated in 
 single words ; and pointed verbal contrasts are fre- 
 quent. There is a certain rugged grandeur, a stern 
 pathos, a scorn for prettiness or florid ornament, but 
 also a lack of ease, grace, and light movement. Anti- 
 phon was the ablest debater and pleader of his day, 
 and in his person the new Rhetoric first appears as a 
 political power at Athens. He took a chief part in 
 organising the Revolution of the Four Hundred, arid 
 when they fell, was put to death by the people (411 
 B.C.), after defending himself in a masterpiece of 
 eloquence. Of his 15 extant speeches, all relating 
 to trials for homicide, 1 2 are mere sketches or studies, 
 forming three groups of four each, in which the case 
 for the prosecution is argued alternately with the case 
 for the defence. The chief of the three speeches in 
 real causes is that On the Murder of Herodes, a de- 
 fence of a young Mitylenean charged (about 417 B.c.) 
 with the murder of an Athenian citizen. 
 
 5. Andocides, born of a good family about 440 
 B. c, was banished from Athens in 415, on suspicion 
 of having been concerned in a wholesale sacrilege, 
 — the mutilation, in one night, of the images of the 
 god Hermes, which stood before the doors of houses 
 and public buildings. He made unsuccessful applica- 
 tion for a pardon, first in 411 B.C., during the reign of 
 the Four Hundred, then, after their fall, in 410, 
 when he addressed the Assembly in the extant speech 
 On his Return. From 410 to 403 he lived a roving 
 merchant's life in Sicily, Italy, Greece, Ionia and 
 Cyprus. In 402 the general amnesty allowed him to 
 
 20* 
 
1 1 8 GREEK LITER A TURE. [part II. 
 
 return to Athens. But in 399 the old charges against 
 him were revived. He defended himself in his extant 
 speech On the Mysteries (so called, because it deals 
 partly with a charge that he had violated the Mys- 
 teries of Eleusis) and was acquitted. During the 
 Corinthian war he was one of an embassy sent to 
 treat for peace at Sparta, and on his return made his 
 extant speech On the Peace with Lacedaemon (390 b.c), 
 sensibly advising Athens to accept the terms offered 
 by Sparta. The speech Against Alcibiades which bears 
 his name is spurious. The chief interest of his work 
 is historical ; he is not an artist of style, but he has 
 much natural force and keenness, and excels in vivid 
 description. 
 
 6. Lysias did a great work for Attic prose, and is, 
 in his own style, one of its most perfect writers. He 
 broke away from the stiff monotony of the old school, 
 and dared to be natural and simple, using the lan- 
 guage of daily life, but with perfect purity and grace. 
 His father was a Syracusan, and Lysias, though born 
 at Athens, had not the rights of a citizen. After pass- 
 ing his youth and early manhood at Thurii in south 
 Italy, he settled at Athens, a wealthy man, in 412 b.c. 
 In 404 he fled from the Thirty Tyrants, who had put 
 his brother Polemarchus to death ; and, after the re- 
 storation of the Democracy, impeached Eratosthenes, 
 one of the Thirty, in the most splendid of his extant 
 speeches (403 b. a), the only one which we know that 
 he himself spoke at Athens. But in 388 b.c. he 
 addressed the assembled Greeks at Olympia, in a fine 
 speech of which we have a fragment, urging them to 
 unite against the two great foes of Greece — Dionysius, 
 tyrant of Syracuse, in the west, and Persia in the east. 
 The speech Against Agoratus (399 b. c. ?) was written 
 for the impeachment of an informer who had slandered 
 away the lives of citizens under the Thirty Tyrants. 
 The great majority of our 34 speeches were composed 
 by Lysias for his clients to speak in public or private 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 119 
 
 causes. They show the dramatic skill with which he 
 could adapt his style to the condition and character of 
 the speaker. The old critics regard Lysias as the model 
 of the plain style of oratory, which conceals its art, 
 and studies the language of ordinary life, as opposed 
 to the grand style represented by Antiphon, and the 
 middle style of Isocrates. 
 
 7. Isocrates differs from the other Greek orators 
 in this, that his discourses were meant to be read rather 
 than spoken. He represents the genius of Attic 
 Greek with less purity of taste than Lysias. But he 
 founded a style of Greek literary prose, which, from 
 about 350 b.c, became the standard one for general 
 use. Its chief characteristics are the avoidance of 
 poetical language and of declamation, the use of an 
 ample flowing period, and great smoothness, obtained 
 chiefly by systematic care against allowing a word 
 ending with a vowel to be followed by a word which 
 begins with one. This style, transmitted through the 
 schools of rhetoric, became the basis of Cicero's; 
 modern literary prose has been modelled largely on 
 the Roman; and thus the influence of Isocrates has 
 gone through all literature. He was born in 436 B.C., 
 5 years before the Peloponnesian war began, and died, 
 aged 9S, in 338, just after the battle of Chaeronea. 
 Milton speaks of him as 'the old man eloquent' whose 
 heart was broken by the news, but the story of his 
 suicide is doubtful. 
 
 We have 21 of his discourses. Five are for law- 
 suits, and belong to his earlier life. The rest are 
 either scholastic — letters, panegyrics, show-pieces, essays 
 on education — ox political. There are also nine letters 
 to friends, including Philip and Alexander the Great. 
 The ruling idea of his life was that of a war by the 
 united Greeks against Persia. The most brilliant of 
 his writings — the Panegyricus (380 B.c.) — on which 
 he is said to have spent ten years — is a plea for such 
 a war, to be led by Athens ; and in his Philippus he 
 11 
 
120 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 urges Philip to lead it. His Areopagiticus (355 b.c.) 
 is a plea for restoring the old moral censorship of the 
 Areopagus; and his discourse (353 B.C.) On the Ex- 
 change of Properties (so called from the fiction of a 
 law-suit on which it is based) is a defence of his 'phi- 
 losophy,' or political culture founded on literary rhetoric. 
 The Encomium on Helen has much beauty. The 
 Letter to Demonicus is full of precepts which often 
 recall the Socrates of Xenophon. 
 
 8. Isaeus,born about 420 b.c, has left 11 speeches 
 in will-cases, ranging in date frorn about 390 (oration v.) 
 to 353 B.C. (oration VII.). An Athenian could not 
 disinherit his son, nor could he separate his estate 
 from his daughter, though he could choose the person 
 whom she was to marry. If childless, he could divert 
 his estate from the next of kin by adopting, either 
 during his life or by testament, an Athenian citizen 
 as his son and heir. The speeches of Isaeus throw a 
 most interesting light on the relations of Attic family 
 life. Their style (best seen in the 8th speech) marks 
 a stage in the development of oratorical prose, the 
 transition from the 'plain' style of Lysias to that full 
 technical mastery which reaches its summit in Demos- 
 thenes. Isaeus is the first great artist in forensic 
 controversy. 
 
 9. Demosthenes, born in 384 b.c. and left an 
 orphan in childhood, studied with Isaeus before, in 
 363 — 2, he prosecuted Aphobus and Onetor, the guar- 
 dians who had wasted his property; and his speeches 
 against them show that he had caught the master's 
 secret of close, vigorous argument. He worked hard to 
 make himself a good speaker ; we are told how he put 
 pebbles in his mouth and declaimed by the loud sea- 
 waves or while he ran up hill, how he wrote out 
 Thucydides eight times, how he was laughed down by 
 the Assembly and comforted by an actor who found 
 him moping about the harbour-town. Not industry, 
 however, or genius alone, but a great idea inspiring 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 121 
 
 his whole life, lifted him to heights reached by no other 
 orator of the old world. Athens, he believed, was the 
 natural head of Greece. Athens must win the confidence 
 of all the Greeks in order to guard Greece against 
 internal or external violence. But before Athens can 
 do this, the public spirit of Athenians must be revived. 
 
 10. Four speeches in public prosecutions — 
 Against Androtion (355), Leptmes (354), Timocrates 
 and Aristocrates (352) — opened his career with pro- 
 tests against corrupt administration at home. Address- 
 ing the Assembly in his speeches On the Navy Boards 
 (354), For Megalopolis (352) and For the Rhodians (351), 
 he warns Athens that she must organise her resources, 
 that she must discountenance the tyranny of Greeks 
 over Greeks, and must everywhere support the cause 
 of Greek freedom against barbarian despotism. The 
 speech (neither finished nor spoken) Against Meidias 
 (349) — who had assaulted Demosthenes in public — 
 shows what bitter enmity the young reformer had 
 provoked. 
 
 11. As Philip of Macedon gradually stretched his 
 power along the coasts of Thrace and Thessaly, 
 Demosthenes saw more and more clearly that this 
 crafty king in the North was the great danger 
 which threatened the disunited Greek cities. His nine 
 speeches against Philip form two groups. (1) The 
 First Philippic (351 B.C.) urges that a force should be 
 sent to the coasts of Thrace, and that citizens should 
 serve in person. The three orations for Olynthus (349-8) 
 plead the cause of the great city, which, with its con- 
 federacy of 32 towns, Philip destroyed in 348. So far, 
 Philip had been a foreign foe. But in 346 he became 
 a Greek power by admission to the Amphictyonic 
 Council. (2) The speeches of the second group — which 
 have to reckon with a more definite Macedonian party 
 within Greece itself — are, the speech On the Peace '(346), 
 The Second Philippic (344), On the Embassy (343), On 
 the Chersonese and the Third Philippic (341). Move by 
 
122 GREEK LITERATURE. [part h. 
 
 move the Macedonian game was explained by Demos- 
 thenes. At the last moment he won Byzantium back 
 to the Athenian alliance, and prevailed on Thebes 
 to join Athens in making a last, but vain, stand at 
 Chaeronea (338). 
 
 12. In 336 b.c. Ctesiphon proposed that Demos- 
 thenes should receive a golden wreath of honour from 
 the State. The orator Aeschines raised legal objections, 
 but was defeated when the case was tried, and left 
 Athens. At the trial (330 B.C.) Demosthenes made a 
 splendid defence of his past policy in the greatest 
 oration of the old world, the speech On the Crown. 
 If the event had been manifest to the whole world before- 
 hand, he said, not even then ought Athens to have forsaken 
 this course, if Athens had any regard for her glory, or 
 for her past, or for the ages to come. In 322 — when 
 
 the rising of the Greeks in the Lamian War, after 
 Alexander's death, had been crushed — Demosthenes 
 took poison to avoid falling into the hands of the 
 Macedonians. 
 
 13. Demosthenes is the greatest master of Greek 
 prose. He combines all the best elements in earlier 
 styles, and blends them in new harmonies. Some of 
 his speeches for private law-suits, written in 
 the midst of his public career, show how this unap- 
 proached artist of political eloquence could at the 
 same time equal or surpass Lysias and Isaeus in their 
 own field. Of our 32 private speeches, only n are 
 probably genuine, viz. the four against Aphobus and 
 Onetor ; those against Spudias, Callicles, Pantaenetus, 
 Nausimachus, Boeotus ( l on the Name') and Conon; 
 with that For Phormio. Firm grasp of facts, sparing 
 use of ornament, sincerity and sustained intensity, are 
 the characteristics which first strike a modern reader 
 in the orations of Demosthenes. We can no longer 
 feel all the delicate touches of that exquisite skill 
 which made them, to the ancients, such marvellous 
 works of art, and which led detractors to reproach 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 123 
 
 them with excess of elaboration. But we can feel, at 
 least, the orator's splendid mastery of every tone 
 which the Greek language could yield, the intellectual 
 greatness of the statesman, the moral greatness of the 
 patriot who warned his people of the impending blow 
 and comforted them when it had fallen. 
 
 14. Aeschines, born in 389, or five years before 
 Demosthenes, was a tragic actor and a clerk to the 
 Assembly before he came forward, about 348, as a 
 public speaker. His natural eloquence, fluent, vehe- 
 ment, and often splendid, was set off by a fine 
 person and voice, which the stage had taught him to 
 make effective. In 346 he was twice an envoy to 
 Philip. His speech Against Timarchus (345) arraigns 
 this man — who was about to prosecute him for breach 
 of trust on the embassy — as disqualified to speak in 
 the Assembly on account of a vicious life : his speech 
 On the Embassy (343), in reply to his former colleague 
 Demosthenes, gained him a narrow acquittal. After 
 the failure of his speech Against Ctesiphon (330) — an 
 elaborate attack on the whole life of Demosthenes — he 
 withdrew to Rhodes. The genius shown in his elo- 
 quence is marred by the want of earnestness and moral 
 nobleness. 
 
 15. Lycurgus, of a noble priestly family, steward 
 of the Treasury from 338 to 326, is represented only 
 by his oration Against Lcocraies (332 B.C.), who had 
 fled from Athens just after the battle of Chaeronea, 
 and who is here indicted for treason in a speech full 
 of lofty indignation, a solemn protest on behalf of 
 public spirit, in which a strain of the old style of Anti- 
 phon is blended with the luxuriance of Isocrates. 
 
 16. From Hypereides we have a speech, nearly 
 complete, For Euxenippus (about 330 B.C.), interesting 
 as showing the public belief in the dreams sent by a 
 god to those who slept in his temple ; fragments of a 
 Funeral Oration on Leosthenes and the comrades who 
 fell with him in the Lamian war (322 b. c.) ; of a speech 
 
124 GREEK LITERATURE. [part II. 
 
 spoken by Hypereides Against Demosthenes in 324, 
 when the latter was accused of having taken bribes 
 from Alexander's treasurer Harpalus ; and of a speech 
 For Lycophron (earlier than 349 B.C.), when Lycurgus 
 was accuser. All these were recovered, between 1847 
 and 1856, from papyri found in Egypt. Hypereides 
 joined fire and pathos to exquisite wit and grace, and 
 was preferred by some to Demosthenes himself. 
 
 1 7. Deinarchus, a Corinthian by birth, the last 
 in the canon of the Ten Attic Orators, has left 
 three speeches, Against Demosthenes, Aristogeiton and 
 Philocles, written when they were accused of taking 
 bribes from Harpalus in 324 B.C. He was mainly a 
 coarse imitator of Demosthenes, and far inferior, 
 probably, to Demades, an orator on the Macedo- 
 nian side at Athens, from whom there remain a few 
 scanty fragments. Demetrius of Phalerum, a 
 pupil of Aristotle, then prepared the decline of Attic 
 oratory in his elegantly luxuriant style, ' preferring his 
 own sweetness to the weight and dignity of his pre- 
 decessors.' 
 
 18. While styles for History and Oratory were thus 
 shaped, Philosophy also found an Attic voice. The 
 Dialogues of Plato, apart from their scientific cha- 
 racter, are masterpieces of literary genius. Pericles 
 died in the autumn of 429 B.C.; Plato was born in the 
 summer of the same year. The family of his father 
 Ariston was noble, tracing its legendary descent up to 
 Codrus, the last king of Athens. From about the age 
 of twenty Plato was acquainted with Socrates, and 
 he was thirty when his master was put to death in 
 399. Plato then left Athens for a time, and, after 
 some stay at Megara with Eucleides (not the geometer), 
 is said to have visited Cyrene and Egypt. The words 
 may still be read on the wall of a temple by the Nile, 
 in which a Greek traveller of old days has written that 
 he came there ' many years after the divine Plato.' 
 
 In 395 b. c. Plato returned to Athens. Dion, brother- 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 125 
 
 in-law of Dionysius I. of Syracuse, met Plato in Italy 
 in 389, and persuaded him to visit the tyrant's court. 
 Plato, having stung Dionysius by his discourse, was 
 delivered to the Spartan envoy Pollis, who happened 
 to be at Syracuse, and was by him sold as a slave in 
 the market at Aegina; but was redeemed by a friend 
 and restored to Athens. After the death of Dionysius I., 
 Plato twice visited his son Dionysius II. at Syracuse : 
 but, though he did not again suffer personal wrong, he 
 found that he could effect no good, and he saw the 
 rule of a sensual despot as he had pictured it in his 
 Republic. About 386 B.C. he had begun to teach in 
 the Academy — (so called from the hero Academus) — a 
 gymnasium with an olive-grove on the outskirts of 
 Athens, near which Plato had a house and garden. 
 He died in 347 B.C., aged 82. 
 
 19. The Greeks were the first people who clearly 
 separated philosophy from theology. The first definite 
 philosophical inquiries in Greece began in the 6th cen- 
 tury b.c, about the same time as the rise of Buddhism 
 in the East. Hitherto Greeks had been content to 
 personify natural agencies. Now they began to ask, 
 What are these agencies ? Cannot these agencies be 
 reduced to one or more elementary principles? As 
 one attempt after another failed, thinkers began to 
 ask — ' How do we get our knowledge of outward 
 things ? and how far can we really know anything at 
 all?' 
 
 20. Then Socrates came, and saw that, to begin 
 with, we must have a better method of search. Let us 
 examine ourselves first of all, and find out, if we can, 
 what we really know and what we only seem to know. 
 For instance, — What is a statesman ? ' A statesman 
 is a man like Pericles.' But if Pericles is tall and elo- 
 quent, must all statesmen be so? Let us try and 
 separate those qualities which belong to all statesmen 
 from those which may be present in one statesman 
 and absent from another. When we have done this, 
 
126 GREEK LITERATURE. [part II. 
 
 we know a statesman in his essence. We have got a 
 conception of a statesman. And in this search it will 
 be good to question other people, and see if they 
 can help us. But what sort of subjects is it best 
 worth while to investigate in this way ? The nature 
 of the sun, moon and stars, the causes of eclipses and 
 earthquakes? '.No,' said Socrates: 'there is some- 
 thing that I want to know first ; I want to know how 
 I, as a man, ought to live and act.' So Socrates made 
 philosophy ethical. 
 
 21. But, with all our struggles to reach clear con- 
 ceptions, h6w can we be sure that it is even possible 
 for us ever to get a glimpse of the very truth ? Plato 
 offered an answer. Everything that we in this world 
 can perceive, Plato said, is a mere copy or image 
 of a perfect original, which, exists in a world above 
 us. For instance, when we have formed our con- 
 ception of a statesman, we have not merely made 
 an abstract definition ; we have got a little nearer — if 
 we have reasoned rightly — to seeing that which really 
 exists. In a world above this, there is a perfect states- 
 man, just as there is a perfect tree, a perfect chair, 
 perfect courage. It is this perfect archetype which 
 really exists ; the earthly copy only seems to exist. 
 This is the Theory of Ideas (from the Greek word 
 ' idea,' ' aspect,' ' form '), that is, the theory of perfect 
 forms or archetypes. And everything that our souls 
 can perceive is good, true or beautiful, according as it 
 resembles the supreme form or 'idea' of all, the idea 
 of Good. 
 
 22. But as the earthly copies are usually poor, 
 faint copies, how can they give the human soul any 
 notion of their perfect originals? They could not, 
 Plato answers, if the soul, before coming into our 
 body, had not had glimpses of those originals. The soul 
 has forgotten much of that vision. But it has not for- 
 gotten all. Even the faint image, like a bad portrait, 
 can serve to remind the soul, if only it strives to recol- 
 
chap, in.] ORATOR Y. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 127 
 
 lect, and does not allow the base passions to disturb 
 it. This is Plato's doctrine of Recollection (anam- 
 nesis). Much of the language in Wordsworth's ' Ode 
 on Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of 
 Early Childhood ' might almost pass for Plato's. ' Not 
 in entire forgetfulness ' have our souls come hither : — 
 
 Hence in a season of calm weather, 
 Though inland far we be, 
 Our souls have sight of that immortal sea 
 Which brought us hither, 
 
 Can in a moment travel thither, 
 And see the children sport upon the shore, 
 And hear the mighty waters rolling evermore. 
 
 23. Now the human soul naturally loves the perfect 
 yforms of goodness, truth and beauty when it beholds 
 
 them ; but this love (eros) may be quickened or ex- 
 tinguished by education. Therefore it is important 
 that every human being should be so educated as to 
 quicken that love. And therefore, in a perfect society, 
 the education of all the citizens would be regulated 
 by those who are themselves already in love with the 
 perfect forms ; and everything that seems likely to 
 deaden that love would be shut out out at any cost. 
 Such a State Plato has sketched in his Republic, — 
 the literary original of works so different as St Augus- 
 tine's City of God, Sir Thomas More's Utopia (i.e. 
 No-land), and Bacon's New Atlantis. In his Laws 
 he traces many details of an ideal code ; thus the city 
 is to be just 9 miles from the sea; the number of 
 citizens is to be just 5040 ; all traders are to be 
 foreigners; and no citizen under forty years of age 
 is to travel. 
 
 24. We have altogether 42 Dialogues under Plato's 
 name, of which about 25 are probably genuine. Philo- 
 sophic dialogue had been written, before Plato, by the 
 Socratic Alexamenus of Teos, and probably by Zeno 
 of Elea and others. But Plato was the first who 
 
128 GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 raised it to an artistic form. The earliest dialogues, 
 composed either before or shortly after the death of 
 Socrates in 399 B.C., trace the essential characteristics 
 of Platonic method, and illustrate the general spirit of 
 the Socratic teaching in contrast with the teaching of 
 the Sophists. Plato's dramatic power and humour are 
 well shown in the dialogues of this period which 
 introduce pompous or rhetorical sophists; such are 
 the Protagoras and the Euthydemus. 
 
 25. Soon after his return to Athens in 395 B. c. he 
 published the Gorgias, which may be regarded as 
 intimating to the Athenian world that he renounces a 
 political career. The first sketch of the Republic, 
 suggesting additional reasons for such a decision, may 
 have followed at no long interval. In a series of 
 dialogues, beginning perhaps with the Theaetetus, and 
 including the Sophistes, Politicus, Parmenides, he gra- 
 dually worked out principles by strict discussion. The 
 Phaedrus, composed probably after his first visit to 
 Sicily in 389 B.C., and when he was commencing to 
 teach in the Academy, is related to the Gorgias as a 
 mature and amended re-statement, with developments, 
 of the views there traced in outline. Later dialogues, 
 such as the Symposium, Phaedo, Philebus, and the 
 Republic in its final form as we have it, show the 
 influence of the school of Pythagoras, which applied . 
 a doctrine of mystic numbers to the theory of real 
 existence, and with which Plato became conversant 
 during his travels, especially in Southern Italy. 
 
 26. Several dialogues of the earlier time raise 
 questions to which they give no formal answers ; they 
 merely hint the direction in which an answer is to be 
 sought. Such are sometimes called dialogues of search. 
 Thus the Lysis asks, 'What is Friendship?' the 
 Charmides, • What is Temperance ?' the Laches, * What 
 is Courage?' the Theaetetus, 'What is Knowledge?' 
 On the other hand, some of the latest dialogues are 
 didactic, helping to build up a definite doctrine, — 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 129 
 
 political, as the Republic and Laws, or cosmical, as 
 the Timacus and Critias. 
 
 27. Plato's style is on the borderland between 
 poetry and prose ; it has exquisite conversational ease 
 and grace ; it has also bursts of soaring eloquence, 
 when we seem to be listening to the words of one who 
 is actually looking on some glorious vision. Some 
 of the finest passages occur in the stories or myths 
 which occasionally serve to relieve or vary the dia- 
 logue ; such as the chariot of the soul, in the Phae- 
 drus ; the world above our own, and the judgment of 
 the dead (Gorgias and Phaedd) ; the man Er's visit to 
 the place of departed souls (Republic) ; the creation 
 of man (Timaeus); the Island of Atlantis [Critias). 
 
 28. No heathen taught a purer conception of God 
 than Plato did: in his ideal State he would have no 
 legends told save such as declare that God is good, and 
 the author of good only : the choruses of children, 
 youths and men shall sing to the young and tender 
 souls of children that the life which the gods deem 
 the happiest is the holiest : and the perfection of man's 
 nature, Plato held, is to bring himself as far as he can 
 into harmony with God. Philo, an Alexandrian Jew 
 (20 a.d.), first blended Plato's doctrines with Judaism; 
 and out of this grew in the 3rd century a.d. the 
 mystical school of Neoplatonism, teaching that the 
 soul must be purged from the taint of the senses till it 
 can hold direct communion, through the Ideas, with 
 God, from whom they emanate. 
 
 29. Aristotle, son of the physician Nicomachus, 
 was born in 384 B.C. at Stageira, on the gulf of 
 Strymon near Mount Athos in Thrace. His family 
 belonged to a clan tracing descent from the mythical 
 physician Asclepius (Aesculapius). In Asclepiad fami- 
 lies, we are told, the boys were regularly taught dis- 
 section. Aristotle's interest in physical science might 
 thus have been roused in boyhood ; but passages in 
 his writings have been thought to indicate that he was 
 
13° GREEK LITERATURE. [part n. 
 
 at least no practised dissector. His life falls into 
 three chapters. 
 
 (i) In 367 B.C., his father being dead, he was sent 
 to Athens by his guardian, Proxenus of Atarneus, and 
 became one of Plato's most distinguished pupils, — 
 ' the mind,' as Plato said, of the school. Plato died 
 in 347, and was succeeded at the head of the 
 Academy by his nephew Speusippus. (2) Aristotle, 
 aged 37, then went to Atarneus in Mysia, of which 
 his former fellow-student Hermeias was now ruler. 
 Hermeias fell a victim to Persian treachery in 344. 
 Aristotle then passed two years at Mitylene. In 342 
 he was invited by Philip of Macedon to be tutor to 
 Alexander, then a boy of fourteen. In 336 Philip 
 died ; Alexander became king ; and Aristotle settled 
 at Athens. (3) At Athens,, about 334 b. c, he began 
 composing that series of great works which he carried 
 on, without a break, to his death in 322 : teaching 
 also in the Lyceum, an enclosure with temple and 
 grounds sacred to the Lycean Apollo. From its 
 covered ivalks (peripatoi), his school were called the 
 Peripatetics. 
 
 Alexander died in 323. Athenian jealousies against 
 Aristotle now broke out. He was accused of 'im- 
 piety ' ; but withdrew, before trial, to Chalcis in 
 Euboea. There he died, rather suddenly, in 322 B.C., 
 aged sixty-two ; thus closing his life, as he had begun 
 it, in the same year with Demosthenes. We are told 
 by writers who were not inclined to be complimen- 
 tary that Aristotle had small eyes, thin legs, and a 
 lisp, that he was attentive to his dress, and that his 
 table was luxurious : from which it may be inferred 
 that he did not give any very strong hold to slander. 
 
 30. The fate of Aristotle's writings is the subject 
 of a story which, though not unquestioned, has good 
 authority. He left his manuscripts to his pupil Theo- 
 phrastus. Theophrastus died in 287, and left them to 
 Neleus. Neleus took them to Scepsis in the Troad, 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 131 
 
 where they were hidden in a vault, to save them from 
 being seized for the Library at Pergamus. About 100 
 A. D., they were sold by the family to Apellicon, a rich 
 Athenian with a taste for book-collecting. In 86 b. c. 
 Sulla took Athens ; Apellicon's library went to Rome ; 
 there Tyrannion, Cicero's learned Greek friend, got 
 leave to arrange it ; and ultimately an edition of 
 Aristotle's manuscripts was brought out at Rome by 
 Androntcus of Rhodes. Now, about 220 B.C. — that 
 is, while the papers were still in their vault — a cata- 
 logue of Aristotle's writings was made at Alexandria, 
 enumerating some 146 works, not one of which we 
 know except from small fragments. What can these 
 have been? It seems likely that they were in large 
 part Aristotle's lost Dialogues, written in his earlier 
 days in imitation of Plato, and praised by Cicero 
 for their ' golden flow,' whereas the style of the extant 
 writings is dry and bald ; — partly papers by his pupils, 
 or mere forgeries; altogether a collection of small 
 worth. If this is true, nothing but a chain of lucky 
 chances saved Aristotle's great works, which, for hun- 
 dreds of years, gave a strong bent to the mind of 
 Europe, and which have had a more direct part in 
 shaping modern thought than any writings of the old 
 world. 
 
 31. Aristotle took almost all human knowledge, as 
 it then was, and mapped it out into several provinces 
 or sciences, seeking to show what principles 
 were peculiar to each science, and what 
 questions each had to answer. Aristotle's whole 
 work, from beginning to end, was one continuous work, 
 of which each part led on to the next, and which 
 made, in his view, one organic whole. 
 
 32. He began with the method of knowledge, 
 and composed the treatises on the science of reasoning 
 which together form his Organon, that is ' Instru- 
 ment,' of reasoning ; treating, in connection with this, 
 the art of Rhetoric, that is the art of discovering, in 
 
 12 
 
132 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 any given case, the available means of persuasion. 
 Aristotle was the first to treat Rhetoric on a scientific 
 system as the popular branch of Dialectic. In 
 another treatise he carried the analysis of Poetry, con- 
 sidered as an imitative art, through the Epic and 
 Tragic branches. Then he turned to the practi- 
 cal sciences of Ethics and Politics. Next — having 
 dealt with that which most immediately concerns man 
 as a moral agent — he went on to the physical 
 sciences; and when he died, he seems to have been 
 at work on what we call Metaphysics, and what he 
 sometimes called the First Philosophy, which 
 seeks to explore the origin and nature of existence 
 and of knowledge itself. 
 
 33. Aristotle's greatest achievement was to found 
 Logic, the science of reasoning. Socrates and Plato 
 had founded Dialectic, the art of discussion. Aris- 
 totle began by trying to find out some general rules 
 which might be useful in this art of discussion. And, 
 as he went on, he perceived that reasoning might, 
 in itself, be a science. He discovered the syllo- 
 gism. He only twice refers to himself, — once 
 in apologising for differing from Plato about the 
 1 Ideas,' and once in saying that he had made out for 
 himself the process of syllogising. He does not use 
 the word ' Logic,' which the Stoics seem to have adopt- 
 ed afterwards. He calls it 'Analytic,' that is, the art of 
 analysing and dissecting the forms in which we reason. 
 Deductive reasoning leads us down from a general to 
 a particular statement: e.g. all men are mortal; A 
 is a man ; therefore he is mortal (deductive syllogism). 
 Inductive reasoning leads us on from a particular to 
 a general statement : e.g. A, B, C, D are swans ; they 
 are white; therefore all swans are white (inductive 
 syllogism). But this conclusion will not be true un- 
 less A, B, C, D are a complete catalogue of swans. 
 Aristotle completed the correct analysis of the 
 deductive process. But he did not work out the 
 
CHAP, ill.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 133 
 
 analysis of the inductive process with the same com- 
 pleteness. And the reason why he did not was that, 
 to the end, he was a dialectician rather than a man 
 of science. 
 
 34. Aristotle's Ethics bear the epithet ' Nicoma- 
 chean,' probably because his son Nicomachus had 
 something to do with editing them. The Eudetnian 
 Ethics are not by Aristotle, but are a paraphrase of 
 his views by his disciple Eudemus. From this work 
 Books v, vi, vii of the ' Nicomachean ' Ethics were 
 probably borrowed by their editor, to fill up a gap left 
 by Aristotle, who, after writing Books 1. — iv., wrote 
 viii. — x. The Magna Moralia, or 'Great Ethics,' 
 which go over the same ground, are by some later 
 member of the school. The end of all action, Aris- 
 totle says, is happiness. Man's happiness consists in the 
 harmonious exercise of his best powers according to 
 their own law of excellence or virtue. Every particular 
 virtue is a mean between two extremes. The Greeks 
 tended to look at ' right ' and ' wrong ' as the morally 
 beautiful and the morally ugly; so that virtue be- 
 comes a sublime form of good taste. The chief 
 thing that Aristotle's Ethics did was to show that 
 virtue is a state of the will, and not, as previous 
 thinkers had said, a state of the reason; and that 
 habits or states of the will are formed by often 
 doing the same kind of action. ' Man,' Aristotle said, 
 1 is a social creature ' ; man, apart from society, would 
 be either a god or a brute. Hence the science of 
 what man ought to do (Ethics) is only a branch of the 
 science of organised society (Politics) ; and Aristotle 
 was the first who treated Ethics separately from 
 Politics. 
 
 35. In the Politics he sketches his Ideal State, 
 with a population of citizens perhaps 20,000 in num- 
 ber, of whom each is to be educated by the State, — to 
 be a landowner of moderate wealth, — to be personally 
 known to the rulers, — to have, in turn, a share in 
 
 2i* 
 
134 GREEK LITERATURE. [part ii. 
 
 ruling, — and to be free from all but political and mili- 
 tary tasks. Slavery, he holds, is essential, in order that 
 citizens may have leisure. No citizen is to be a 
 tradesman or a mechanic : and no interest is to be 
 taken on money. Monarchy, Aristocracy, and a mixed 
 Constitutional Government (Politeia) are described, 
 with the three forms into which they respectively de- 
 generate, — Tyranny, Oligarchy and Democracy. Aris- 
 totle's remarks on these, and on revolutions, are often 
 curiously illustrated by the history of the Italian Re- 
 publics. He has no idea of Representative Govern- 
 ment. 
 
 36. In his contributions to the science of life, or 
 what is now called 'biology,' Aristotle defines soul, or 
 the vital principle, as the essential actuality of an organ- 
 ised body, — a marked advance on the popular view of 
 life as something that could detach itself from the body. 
 In his Researches about Animals we have the earliest 
 book on Natural History. It has been shown 
 that he notices, or indicates, about 500 species, in- 
 cluding about 350 vertebrates. One of his contribu- 
 tions to mental science was to bring out clearly 
 some of the laws of association of ideas, which distin- 
 guishes the human power of recollection from the mere 
 memory of other animals. 
 
 37. During the first four centuries of the Christian 
 era Aristotle busied a long series of Greek commen- 
 tators. Then came centuries during which he was 
 known to Western Europe only through Latin versions 
 of some of his minor logical works. And then, at the 
 end of the 12th century, the Arabian scholar Averroes 
 (Ibn Raschid) made the great works of Aristotle known 
 by commentaries which were translated into Latin. 
 Thomas Aquinas caused a new translation of Aristotle 
 to be made (1260 — 1270 a. d.) from the Greek; Dante 
 (1300) hails Aristotle as 'the master of those who 
 know;' Chaucer describes the Oxford student of the 
 14th century who has 'twenty bookes clothed in blake 
 
chap, in.] ORATORY. PHILOSOPHICAL PROSE. 135 
 
 or red' of Aristotle 'at his beddes hed;' and till the 
 second half of the 16th century his authority was 
 almost supreme. His physical theory of the universe, 
 which was the basis of the Ptolemaic, was not finally 
 displaced by the Copernican before the end of the 
 17th century. To this day, when men talk of 'mind 
 and matter,' ' final cause/ ' motive,' ' the end of our 
 aims,' ' faculty,' ' habit,' ' actually,' they are talking the 
 Latinised language of Aristotle. 
 
 38. Theophrastus of Eresus in Lesbos (374 — 287 
 B.C.) succeeded Aristotle at the head of the Lyceum, 
 and followed his master in handling physical as well 
 as moral science. We have from him two botanical 
 works, Researches about Plants in nine books, and Prin- 
 ciples of Vegetable Life in six books, which show him 
 to have been a thorough and acute inquirer ; also 30 
 short, lively sketches of character — such as ' The Flat- 
 terer,' 'The Grumbler,' 'The Boastful Man,' 'The 
 Man of Petty Ambition.' These Characters were 
 the original models of those sketches which English 
 literature produced in the 17 th century, such as Hall's 
 Characteristnes of Verities and Vices, Overbury's Cha- 
 racters or Witty Descriptions of the Properties of Sundry 
 Persons, and Earle's Microcosmographie. 
 
 39. The minor Socratic schools, as they are 
 sometimes called, were the Megaric, founded by 
 Eucleides of Megara, distinguished for criticism of 
 reasoning processes, especially for the invention of 
 logical fallacies or puzzles ; the Cynic, founded by 
 Antisthenes, placing virtue in renunciation of the 
 natural pleasures, and contempt for the natural decen- 
 cies, of life; the Cyrenaic, founded by Aristippus of 
 Cyrene, who pursued equable pleasure through versa- 
 tile self-discipline. But the school of the Academy 
 founded by Plato, and the Peripatetic school 
 founded by Aristotle, held the foremost place till the 
 earlier part of the 3rd century b. c. Two new schools 
 then began to gain ground. 
 
136 GREEK LITERATURE. [part 11. 
 
 40. Epicurus (342 — 270 b.c.) taught the dis- 
 ciples gathered round him at his house near Athens, — 
 in those pleasure-grounds from which Epicureans are 
 called 'the Philosophers of the Garden' — that man 
 should seek the enjoyment of the hour, undisturbed by 
 fear of gods who regard him not, or of that ' death ' 
 which is merely the resolution of the body into such 
 atoms as compose the universe. The school called 
 Stoic, from the ' Painted Stoa' or Porch at Athens 
 frequented by its masters, was founded by Zeno (344 
 — 260 B.C.) and developed by his followers Cleanthes 
 and Chrysippus. Virtue, they held, is the only good. 
 Nothing is evil except in so far as it is contrary to 
 virtue. And virtue consists in living according to 
 Nature, that is, according to the divine reason in which 
 we participate. Stoicism first showed its full power 
 when it took hold on the congenial Roman mind. 
 But, in its best Roman representatives, it never wholly 
 lost the gentleness of its earlier Greek home ; and, 
 under the early or the declining Empire, it became 
 the dominant influence in some of the noblest charac- 
 ters that the heathen world had known. 
 
chap. I.] FROM ALEXANDER TO AUGUSTUS. 137 
 
 PART III. THE LITERATURE OF THE 
 DECADENCE. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 from alexander to augustus. 
 
 300—30 b.c. 
 
 I. The Alexandrian Period : 300 — 146 B.C. Poetry: Callima- 
 chus, Lycophron, 260 B. C. Apollonius Rhodius, 194. Aratus, 
 270. Nicander, 150. Theocritus, Bion, 270; Moschus 
 their younger contemporary. — Learning and Science: Zeno- 
 dotus, 280. Aristophanes. 209. Aristarchus, 156. Apol- 
 lodorus, 140. Euclid, 300. Eratosthenes, Archimedes, 
 210.— History: Manetho, Berosus, 270. 
 
 II. The Graeco-Roman Period: 146 B.C.— 529 A. v. First 
 part: — From the Roman Conquest of Greece to the end of the 
 Roman Republic, 146—30 B. c. . History : Polybius, 145 B. C ; 
 Diodorus Siculus, 40 B.C. 
 
 i. Hellenism. When Philip of Macedon defeated 
 the Greeks at Chaeronea, the Greek cities became 
 really dependent on Macedon. They kept their sepa- 
 rate laws, but they had no longer any real power of 
 acting in great matters as they chose. Their free 
 political life was gone. Then came Alexander's con- 
 quests in the East, and the sudden break-up of his 
 empire at his death into three chief kingdoms, Mace- 
 donia, Asia, Egypt. One great result of his conquests 
 had been the spreading abroad of Greek civilisation. 
 Many cities, such as Antioch and Seleucia, were 
 founded in Western Asia, inhabited partly by Asiatics 
 and partly by Greeks from various parts. Under the 
 rule of Alexander's Successors these new cities in 
 Asia could not have the true life of the old Greek 
 cities, of which the soul was political independence. 
 
138 GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 But in outward things they were Greek. Greek was 
 the language generally spoken. Greek books were 
 read and written. There were Greek temples, statues, 
 baths, porticoes, theatres. This civilisation, 
 Greek in its general character, but pervading 
 people not exclusively Greek by race, is pro- 
 perly called Hellenism, which means, — not ' being 
 Hellenes ' or Greeks, but — ' doing like Hellenes ;' and 
 as the adjective answering to Hellas is Hellenic, so the 
 adjective answering to Hellenism is Hellenistic. 
 
 2. All the great Hellenic poetry and prose had 
 its spring in a spontaneous impulse of the author, who 
 wished to say to his fellow-citizens that which he felt 
 was good and worthy to be heard. And the people 
 tried his work, not by the arbitrary rules of a school or 
 a clique, but by the standard of real experiences, and 
 by a feeling for beauty which had become instinctive 
 through the graciousness of their daily surroundings. 
 The poet of the Iliad sang of legends which were a 
 living joy to all who heard them, even as to himself. 
 Simonides and Pindar, — Aeschylus, Sophocles and 
 Euripides, — Herodotus, Thucydides, — all these were 
 creative artists, whose efforts were quickened by the 
 healthy inspiration of a natural life and controlled by 
 that genuine criticism which came to them in the 
 voice of the city. 
 
 3. But as the vigour of the Greek cities decayed, 
 the citizen began to care less for the city and more 
 for his private pursuits. Social life became more 
 and more separate from public life, with which 
 it had before been one. Among thoughtful men who 
 did not engage in politics the old exclusiveness of 
 Hellenic sentiment began to be modified. Such men 
 began to ask not, Is he a Greek citizen 1 — but, Has he 
 a Greek mind? This enlargement of intellectual 
 sympathy — at the same time a sign of political decay 
 — had first begun to show itself in the age of Epamei- 
 nondas, and, by its progress among the few, had 
 
chap. I.] FROM ALEXANDER TO AUGUSTUS. 139 
 
 helped to prepare the dissolution of Hellenic unity. 
 It finds its clear and memorable expression in the 
 words of Isocrates : 'Athens has brought it to pass 
 that the name of Greek should be thought no longer 
 a matter of race, but a matter of intelligence ; 
 and should be given to the participators in our culture 
 rather than to the sharers of our common origin.' 
 
 4. The literature of Hellenism is no longer spon- 
 taneous or creative. It does not take its inspiration 
 directly from life, but from books already existing. 
 The Hellenic literature was original : the 
 Hellenistic literature is derivative. Writers 
 now appeal — not to the whole body of their fellow- 
 citizens, as in the free Greek cities — but to the noble 
 or learned few who, amid mongrel populations speak- 
 ing mixed jargons, are the judges of Greek style. 
 Literature becomes a polite industry, in which success 
 is to be achieved by obeying or inventing critical 
 canons. Mannerism and affectation begin to invade it. 
 
 5. Alexandria, the new capital of the Ptolemies, 
 was the first great seat of literary Hellenism. Com- 
 merce quickly made its home at this natural centre of 
 the traffic between East and West ; and material wealth, 
 in migrating from Greece to Egypt, drew the arts and 
 sciences in its train. King Ptolemy I., surnamed Soter, 
 ' the Preserver' (306 — 285 B.C.), founded the Museum, 
 or Temple of the Muses, which was somewhat like a 
 modern university. The buildings included galleries 
 of art, lecture-rooms and dining-halls. Distinguished 
 men of learning were maintained at the Museum ; and 
 the beautiful gardens, with their shady walks, their 
 statues and fountains, became famous as the haunt of 
 Alexandrian poets and scholars. 'School after school, 
 they had all walked and taught and sung there, beneath 
 the spreading planes and chestnuts, figs and palm- 
 trees. The place seemed fragrant with all the riches 
 of Greek thought and song." The Library had 
 
 1 Kingsley's Hypatia. 
 
14° GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 once contained, in about 700,000 manuscripts, almost 
 all that had been written in Greek ; and even after the 
 siege by Caesar, when part was burned, contained 
 400,000. 'There it towered up, the wonder of the 
 world, its white roof bright against the rainless blue ; 
 and beyond it, among the ridges and pediments of 
 noble buildings, a broad glimpse of the bright sea.' 
 
 6. In the Alexandrian literature, Prose holds the 
 foremost place, and is especially employed in the 
 labours of science and erudition. The ideal forms 
 of the earlier Hellenic art can no longer be repro- 
 duced with freshness or success. Poetry either 
 imitates these forms in a learned and scientific spirit, 
 or seeks novelty in the by-paths of some lighter strain. 
 
 7. Learned poetry. — Callimachus (260 b.c.) 
 has left six Hymns to the Gods, and a collection 
 of epigrams ; but his once famous elegies are repre- 
 sented only by fragments, and by the Latin translation 
 of Catullus from his • Lock of Berenice.' Berenice, 
 the queen of Ptolemy Euergetes, had dedicated some 
 tresses of her hair in a temple ; they had been stolen ; 
 and the court-poet makes them relate how the gods 
 had placed them among the stars. Ovid imitated his 
 Ibis, a poetical invective against his pupil the poet 
 Apollonius ; and took the idea of the Fasti partly 
 from his Aitia or ' Origins' of sacred tradition and 
 usage. Apollonius Rhodius (194 b.c.) wrote the 
 Argonautica, an epic in four books on Jason's ' Voyage 
 in the Argo' to win the golden fleece. It is the work 
 of a learned Homeric scholar who has not the Ho- 
 meric feeling for the heroic age ; it is artificial, and 
 somewhat cold ; but there is some fine dramatic paint- 
 ing; the poem is full of literary interest, and is the 
 best of its class that the Alexandrian age has left. 
 From Lycophron (260 b.c), the most celebrated 
 tragic poet of Alexandria, we have a poem called 
 Alexandra in about 1400 iambic verses, in which Cas- 
 sandra predicts how the voyage of Paris to Sparta will 
 
chap. I.] FROM ALEXANDER TO AUGUSTUS. 141 
 
 affect the fortunes of Asia and Greece. The mytho- 
 logy is obscured by far-fetched metaphor, and curiously 
 illustrates the taste ' of the time for learned riddles in 
 verse. 
 
 8. Didactic poetry. — Aratus (270 b. c.) was 
 the author of an astronomical epic which Cicero trans- 
 lated, entitled Prognostics of the Weather (Diosemeia). 
 It is from Aratus that St Paul, addressing the Athenians, 
 quotes the words ' For we are also his offspring ' (Acts 
 xvii. 28). Nicander (150 b.c.) versified medical lore 
 in two epics still extant, — one, called Theriaca, on 
 venomous bites, the other, called Alexipharmaca, on 
 antidotes to poison. His lost Georgics were consulted 
 by Virgil ; and Ovid used his Transformations {Heier- 
 oioumena) as well as the Metamorphoses of the later 
 poet Parthenius. 
 
 9. Pastoral poetry. — Theocritus, a Syracusan, 
 flourished about 270 B.C., under Ptolemy II. (Phila- 
 delphus), and is the Greek representative of pastoral 
 or bucolic poetry. Shepherds contending for a prize 
 in alternate or amoebaeic strains gave rise to this rustic 
 poetry, which was distinctively Dorian and espe- 
 cially Sicilian : hence Milton calls his Lycidas, in which 
 one shepherd is supposed to be mourning for another, 
 a Doric lay, and invokes the Sicilian muse. Besides 
 some epigrams and fragments, we have 3 1 short poems 
 under the name of Theocritus, — though the genuine- 
 ness of some is doubtful, — mainly in the Doric dialect. 
 Scarcely one half of these are properly pastoral in 
 subject ; but most of them may properly be called 
 idyls, i. e. little pictures of life 1 . Here we see the 
 dramatic influence of the Dorian farces or mimes, 
 which Sophron made popular about 440 B.C.: espe- 
 cially in the 15 th idyl, an amusing account of two 
 
 1 Virgil's similar poems, in which he occasionally imitates 
 Theocritus, are called by the later name of Eclogues, 'selections,' 
 a general name for short pieces. 
 
142 GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 Alexandrian ladies from Syracuse going to a festival. 
 Much in Theocritus is artificial and conventional. But 
 there is a true feeling for the sights and sounds of 
 country life; the whisper of rustling leaves is in his 
 poetry, the murmur of bees over summer flowers, the 
 plashing of fountains in cool shades, the sunny bright- 
 ness of the Sicilian sea. This, with his dramatic skill, 
 might well commend him to dwellers in a city like Alex- 
 andria. 
 
 10. Bion, a native of Ionia, was another pastoral 
 poet, best known to us by his Lament for Adonis, 
 which Shelley has used in his Adonais, and which 
 Mrs Browning has translated. The burden, ' Woe for 
 Cytherea, beautiful Adonis is dead,' recurs at inter- 
 vals; such refrains are found elsewhere, as in the 
 choruses of Aeschylus, in the first idyl of Theocritus, 
 and in the exquisite lament of a third pastoral poet, 
 Moschus of Syracuse, for the death of his master 
 Bion. Few verses in Greek have more melody or more 
 pathos than those in which Moschus sings that the 
 glory of the garden fades to bloom again, but man, when 
 he is once laid in the grave, sleeps an everlasting sleep. 
 
 1 1. Parody and metrical satire flourished in the 
 Alexandrian age, — springing, like the pastoral poetry, 
 from a Dorian origin. Its most famous representa- 
 tive was Timon of Phlius (280 B.C.), who in his 
 Parodies called Silloi, couched in hexameter verse, 
 satirised all the dogmatic schools of philosophy. 
 
 12. Prose. — Philology and Criticism. — Ze- 
 nodotus (280 b.c), who became Librarian of the 
 Museum under Ptolemy Philadelphus, entered upon 
 the task of correcting and interpreting the texts of the 
 Greek poets, especially Homer. He wrote memoirs of 
 literary history, and compiled lists of rare words or 
 phrases. Aristophanes of Byzantium (200 b.c.) 
 extended his labours to the prose writers, and sought 
 to preserve the true pronunciation of Greek, — which 
 mixed populations were rapidly corrupting, — by intro- 
 
chap. I.] FROM ALEXANDER TO AUGUSTUS. 143 
 
 ducing written signs to mark, in each word, the syllable 
 on which the accent, i.e. the stress of the voice, 
 ought to fall. Aristarchus (156 b.c), by his effort 
 to place textual criticism and interpretation on a basis 
 of principles, became the founder of scientific 
 scholarship. He rigorously revised the canon, or 
 list of first-rate Greek writers in each kind, which his 
 predecessors had drawn up. Admission to one of 
 these select classes constituted what is still called a 
 classic. One great work of these Alexandrian scholars 
 and their followers — work known to us now chiefly 
 from the fragmentary notices of later commentators — 
 was to establish a science of Grammar. Under 
 the name of Apollodorus (140 b.c), a pupil of 
 Aristarchus, we have a Bibliotheca or Library of Greek 
 mythology in 3 books ; which shows how the old 
 literal belief in the myths had survived the attempt 
 of Euhemerus (300 b.c.) to resolve them into fact or 
 fiction. 
 
 13. Translation, especially of sacred books, was a 
 province of the learned labour of Alexandria. The 
 Greek version of the Hebrew Scriptures of the Old 
 Testament was begun at Alexandria in the first half of 
 the third century B. c, but was not completed before 
 the end of the second century b. c. It was called the 
 version of the Septuagint or Seventy, perhaps be- 
 cause it was authorised by the seventy members of the 
 Jewish Sanhedrim. 
 
 14. Science. — Eucleides, or, as we call him, 
 Euclid, was at Alexandria in the reign of Ptolemy 
 Soter, and gave Geometry a system in his famous 
 Elements. Archimedes, who died in 212 b.c, the- 
 reputed inventor of the screw {helix), excelled in pure 
 and applied mechanics. His contemporary Erato- 
 sthenes was the founder of astronomical geography 
 and of scientific chronology. We have a piece of 
 chronological work from the Alexandrian age in the 
 Parian Marble, a summary of events in Greek history 
 
 13 
 
144 GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 from the earliest times to 264 b. c, but available in its 
 present state only to 355 b.c. 
 
 15. Chronology was combined with history by two 
 writers who borrowed the Greek language of the 
 governments under which they lived. Manetho, an 
 Egyptian priest in the reign of Ptolemy Philadelphus 
 (285 — 247 b.c), wrote Chronicles of Egypt. This 
 work, of which only fragments remain, traced 31 
 dynasties down to the conquest of Egypt by Macedon. 
 Berosus, i.e. Bar-Osea, a priest at Babylon in the 
 reign of Antiochus Soter (280 — 261 B.C.), carried the 
 Chronicles of Chaldaea down to his own time. The 
 authority of his work, based partly on the temple- 
 archives, has been confirmed by a comparison of its 
 fragments with the Old Testament. 
 
 16. Thus the Alexandrian age busied itself 
 ■with literary or scientific research, and with 
 setting in order what the Greek mind had 
 done in its creative time. This spirit of many- 
 sided labour lived on into the Byzantine age, pro- 
 ducing histories, miscellanies, lexicons, down to the 
 taking of Constantinople by the Turks (1453), when 
 exiled Greeks began to spread the knowledge of their 
 language and literature more widely through Western 
 Europe. 
 
 17. Greece became subject to Rome in 146 b.c 
 The result was to bring Rome into closer and more 
 constant intercourse with the mind of Greece, and to 
 begin that process, not completed till the time of 
 Augustus, by which the political life of Hellenism was 
 absorbed into the universal system of Rome. The 
 first part of the Graeco- Roman period in Greek 
 Literature extends to the close of the Roman 
 Republic. 
 
 18. Polybius, the greatest Greek historian after 
 Herodotus and Thucydides, stands on the border be- 
 tween the great Alexandrian age and that literature of 
 which Rome was the central inspiration. He was born 
 
chap, i.] FROM ALEXANDER TO AUGUSTUS. 145 
 
 about 210, and died about 128 b.c. Seldom has 
 so wide a variety of political experience been crowded 
 into one life-time. His youth and early manhood fell 
 on the days when the League of the Achaean cities was 
 making its last stand against Rome.- He was thus 
 familiar with the earliest example of Federal Govern- 
 ment — i. e. a league of communities in which each has 
 control of its home affairs, but obeys a common au- 
 thority in things which touch the common interest. 
 His father Lycortas was captain of the League in 
 185-4 B.C., and came into office again when Philopoe- 
 men — the last hero of ancient Greece — died in 183. 
 When the Romans had conquered Perseus, King of 
 Macedon, Polybius was one of the 1000 Achaeans who 
 were carried off to Rome. He was taken into the 
 house of Aemilius Paulus, whose second son, the 
 younger Scipio, was his friend ; and, after 1 7 years, he 
 procured the release of the other Achaeans. He was 
 with Scipio at the destruction of Carthage in 146, and 
 saw the burning of Corinth in the same year. The 
 cities of the Achaean League then became subject to 
 Rome, and Polybius was allowed by the Roman Com- 
 missioners to arrange the details of the new con- 
 stitution (145 B.C.). He earned the gratitude of his 
 countrymen ; and statues in his honour were set up 
 in several cities, including his native Megalopolis in 
 Arcadia. 
 
 19. His History, in 40 books, was a record of 
 Roman conquest from 264 b.c. to 146 B.C. We have 
 only the first 5 books, and large extracts, or shorter 
 fragments, of Books vi. — xl. (i) Books 1. and 11. 
 are introductory, linking on the History to that of 
 Timaeus, which ended at 264 B.c. They deal chiefly 
 with the First Punic War (263-241) and the Achaean 
 League. (2) Book in. carries the Second Punic War 
 down to the Battle of Cannae (218-216); Books iv. 
 and v. treat of Wars in Greece and Syria. The follow- 
 ing books, to the 30th inclusive, traced Roman con- 
 
146 GREEK LITERATURE. [part hi. 
 
 quest to 168 b.c. The 31st to the 40th covered the 
 period 167 — 146 B.C. Polybius used some Roman 
 authorities, as the annalist Fabius Pictor; and Livy, 
 from the beginning of the second Punic War, makes 
 large use of Polybius. 
 
 20. Rome, says Polybius, is the noblest atid most bene- 
 ficent work of Fortune. But this ' Fortune ' is no blind 
 force ; rather, in his own phrase, an honest umpire, an in- 
 telligent Providence, which has given the prize of empire 
 to an imperial people. Polybius felt the inborn fitness 
 of the Romans to govern. His own age decided that, 
 as Greece was first in the things of the mind, so 
 Rome was to rule the nations. The bent of his great 
 work was to show that this was no accident, but the 
 deliberate purpose of a wise Power. ' The whole earth 
 subject to Rome'' is his vision. Yet he writes neither as 
 a Roman, nor as a Greek who flatters Rome, but as a 
 Greek with keen insight and a clear sense of harmony. 
 Of earlier history he is not always a good judge ; he 
 shows that he did not understand the growth of the 
 Roman constitution, and he misjudges Demosthenes ; 
 but he understood the lessons of his own wonderful 
 age. He had known Achaia, Macedonia, Syria, Car- 
 thage all, in different measures, independent of Rome ; 
 and he had seen each in turn subdued by her. His 
 style has been called 'a camp style.' It is plain, 
 straightforward, sometimes rough; but it has not the 
 faults of the contemporary rhetoric. His work has 
 the further interest of being the oldest and best in 
 the common dialect, based on the Attic, which 
 dates from about 300 B.c, and is distinguished by a 
 few peculiar forms, but chiefly by a less pure voca- 
 bulary. 
 
 2 1 . All things gradually converged towards Rome. 
 The learning of Alexandria and Athens was brought 
 thither by the numerous Greek men of letters who 
 found patrons or pupils in Roman families. From 
 about 80 b. c, Greek literature, especially Rhetoric, 
 
chap. II.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. 147 
 
 became thoroughly established in the higher Roman 
 education. The study of History and Geography 
 also nourished. 
 
 22. Diodorus Siculus (40 b.c.) wrote a history 
 of the world in 40 books, down to Caesar's Gallic Wars. 
 We have only Books 1. — v., dealing with the early or 
 mythical history of Egypt, Assyria, Aethiopia and 
 Greece; and Books xi. — xx.,from the invasion of Greece 
 by Xerxes (480 b.c.) to 302 b.c. ; with fragments. This 
 Historical Library was, as the title implies, less a 
 single history than a series of histories, founded on the 
 labours of predecessors, and grouped round the point 
 which Polybius had recognised as henceforth the 
 centre of political interests — Rome. 
 
 23. Historians had now ceased to produce original 
 works with an artistic unity, such as. those of Herodotus 
 and Thucydides. Their aim was to present, in new com- 
 binations or more lucid arrangements, facts amassed 
 by previous writers. This endeavour becomes the 
 source of the most useful work which marks the 
 closing centuries of the old literature. 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 from augustus to justinian. 
 
 30 b.c.— 529 a.d. 
 
 GraeCO-Roman period continued. — I. History ', Biography, 
 Geography: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 25 B.C.: Plutarch, 90 
 A.D. : Strabo, 18 A.D.: Pausanias, 160 A.D. — II. Erudition: 
 Athenaeus, 190 A.D. — III. Rhetoric and Belles Lettres : Lucian, 
 160 A.D.; Libanius, 350 A.D.; Heliodorus, 390 A.D. — IV. 
 Philosophy: Stoics: Epictetus, 90 a.d.; Marcus Aurelius, 
 170 A.D. Neoplatonists : Plotinus, Porphyry, Iamblichus, 
 250 — 300 A.D. School of Athens: Proclus, 450 A.D.— 
 V. Verse: Babrius, 40 A.D. ; Oppian, 180 a.d.; Nonnus, 
 Quintus Smyrnaeus, 400 — 450 a.d.; Musaeus, 500 A.D. — 
 Mystic poetry. — Anthology. — 'Sibylline Oracles.' 
 
 i. Under the Roman Empire the Greek language 
 and literature were diffused throughout the civilised 
 
148 GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 world. Institutions resembling universities arose in 
 the great cities. Teachers recognised by the State 
 gave celebrity to the schools of Alexandria and 
 Antioch, of Tarsus and Rhodes, of Pergamus and 
 Byzantium, of Athens and Rome, of Marseilles and 
 Lyons. The varied literature of Hellenism in the five 
 centuries from Augustus to Justinian has four great 
 departments : — History, with the neighbouring pro- 
 vinces of Biography and Geography; Erudition, 
 including grammar, criticism, archaeology and literary 
 miscellanies ; Rhetoric, in theory and practice, with 
 kindred forms of ornamental prose, such as Dialogues, 
 Novels and Letters; Philosophy, represented 
 chiefly by Stoics and Neoplatonists. In Poetry there 
 is little to record. 
 
 2. History. — Dionysius of Halicarnassus (25 
 B.C.), in his Archaeology, i. e. Early History, of Rome 
 to 264 b.c. aimed at writing an Introduction to 
 Polybius. He maintains, on fanciful grounds, that 
 the Romans, who deserve to rule the world, are no 
 1 barbarians,' but of Greek descent. We have Books 
 1. — x., going down to 450 B.C., and fragments of Book 
 XI. He did a better work in his rhetorical writings, 
 and above all in his excellent essays on the Greek 
 orators. His object was to revive a true standard 
 of Attic prose ; and in this he was aided by his 
 friend Caecilius, of Calacte in Sicily, who devoted 
 himself especially to the province of verbal scholar- 
 ship. 
 
 3. Josephus, of a noble Jewish family, wrote in 
 Greek the Early History of the Jews, to 66 a.d., in 
 20 books, on the model of Dionysius ; and the History 
 of the Jewish War in 7 books. The latter, his best 
 work, extends from the capture of Jerusalem by Antio- 
 chus Epiphanes in 170 b.c. to its capture by Titus, 
 which the historian witnessed. 
 
 4. Arrian, born about 100 a. d., and raised to con- 
 sular rank by M. Antoninus Pius in 146, emulated 
 
chap. II.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. M9 
 
 Xenophon's Anabasis by relating the Asiatic Expedi- 
 tion of Alexander the Great in 7 books, of which we 
 have all but the end of the 7th ; and, after the example 
 of Xenophon's contemporary Ctesias (a Greek physician 
 at the Persian court) wrote, in the Ionic dialect, an 
 Indian History, including the voyage of Alexander's 
 general Nearchus from the mouth of the Indus to the 
 Persian Gulf. And, as Xenophon preserved records 
 of his master Socrates, so Arrian preserved records of 
 his master Epictetus, who, like Socrates, left nothing 
 written. From Appian (140 a.d.) we have still 10 
 books, besides fragments, of a History of Rome, divided 
 according to the countries. Herodian (240 a.d.) 
 has left a history of the Emperors from Commodus to 
 Gordian (180 — 238 A.D.), in a style far from pure, but 
 not without dramatic force. 
 
 5. Biography. — Plutarch was born at Chaeronea 
 in Boeotia about 40 a.d. He frequently visited Rome, 
 and received honours from the emperors Trajan and 
 Hadrian ; but he never thoroughly mastered Latin ; 
 and, though he could use Roman annalists, the only 
 allusion to Roman poetry in all his works is a quota- 
 tion from Horace in his life of Lucullus. Greece in 
 his day had been almost drained of inhabitants ; he 
 tells us that the whole country could not put more 
 than 3000 men in the field — the number sent in old 
 days by one little town, Megara, to Plataea. It may 
 have been partly the wish to remind the world that 
 Greece could once breed as good men as Rome that 
 led him to write his 46 Parallel Lives. These 
 1 Lives ' are in pairs, one Greek and one Roman in 
 each pair. The ground of comparison is sometimes 
 rather slight ; thus Alcibiades and Coriolanus seem to be 
 joined merely because both were slain in banishment. 
 There are also four detached Lives — Artaxerxes II. 
 (Mnemon), Araius, founder of the Achaean League, 
 and the Emperors Galba and Otho. These Lives are 
 vivid portraits of character, with some brilliant his- 
 
 22* 
 
IS© GREEK LITERATURE. [part hi. 
 
 torical pictures. Plutarch was useful to Shakspere 
 (through North's translation) in the Roman plays. 
 
 The Moralia or 'Ethical Works ' are a collection 
 of about 80 pieces, by no means all on ethical subjects, 
 but also on history, archaeology, and physical science. 
 Some of the best ethical pieces are those on Garrulity, 
 on False Shame, on Restraining Anger, on the Delays 
 of Divine Justice. Among works wrongly ascribed to 
 Plutarch are the ' Lives of the Ten Orators,' a ' Life 
 of Homer,' and probably the collections of Apoph- 
 thegms. These ' Sayings ' are sometimes neat. There 
 is one of a flute-player, with whom Philip of Macedon 
 was arguing about music, replying, ' Heaven forbid 
 that your Majesty should understand these things as 
 well as I do. : Some Olynthian traitors complained to 
 Philip that the Macedonians taunted them with having 
 destroyed their native town. 'The Macedonians,' 
 Philip answered, 'are boorish creatures; they call a 
 spade a spade.' 
 
 6. Diogenes Laertius, who is usually placed early 
 in the third century, in his eighty-four Lives of the 
 Philosophers, deals with the early schools of Greek 
 Philosophy, with the schools of Plato and Aristotle, 
 and, in fuller detail, with Epicurus. Though neither 
 an accurate nor an elegant writer, he is often valuable 
 as supplying information which is preserved nowhere 
 else. Flavius Philostratus (235 a.d.), in his 59 
 Lives of the Sophists, gives us valuable material for 
 the later history of Rhetoric. In his Pictures (Eikones) 
 he has described 66 paintings of various classes, pro- 
 fessedly from real works in a gallery at Naples, but 
 more probably from his own imagination. Though 
 essentially rhetorical in conception, this curious and 
 once popular treatise is of much interest for art- 
 history. Appollonius of Tyana (50 A.D.), whose Life 
 Philostratus has written, was a renowned mystic, com- 
 bining pythagoreanism with oriental magic, who in 
 the third century received divine honours. The Em- 
 
chap. II.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. 151 
 
 peror Alexander Severus placed the bust of this 
 pretended miracle-worker in his Larium along with 
 those of Abraham, Orpheus and Christ. 
 
 7. Geography — Strabo (18 a.d.) wrote a geo- 
 graphical work in 17 books, describing Europe (Bks. 
 iv. — x.), Asia (xi. — xvi.), Egypt and Libya (xvn.). 
 His feeling is everywhere literary rather than pic- 
 turesque ; places interest him as the scenes of great 
 deeds or because they are mentioned in great poems. 
 Pausanias (160 a.d.) has left a Tour of Greece in 
 10 books — (going through Attica — Corinth — Laconia 
 — Messenia — Elis — Achaia — Arcadia — Boeotia — 
 Phocis) — which is of the greatest value for the details 
 of topography and the monuments of art. Some- 
 what in the spirit of Herodotus, but less simply and 
 freshly, he seeks to bring out the religious meaning 
 of all that he sees on this sacred ground of Greece. 
 Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus) of Alexandria (160 
 a.d.) built up a mathematical system of astronomy and 
 geography which was universally received until, in the 
 course of the 16th and 17th centuries, the system of 
 Copernicus displaced it. Ptolemy believed that the 
 sun, planets and stars revolved round the earth. His 
 error in calculating the circumference of the globe 
 warranted Columbus in supposing that the distance 
 from the western coast of Europe to the eastern coast 
 of Asia was about one-third less than it actually is ; 
 and thus encouraged the enterprise which led to the 
 discovery of America. 
 
 8. Erudition continued to be fertile in the vari- 
 ous branches of grammatical or critical work com- 
 menced at Alexandria. Among its products in this 
 kind may be named the contribution to Greek lexi- 
 cography made by Julius Pollux in the second 
 century. The physician Galen (160 a.d.) wrote com- 
 mentaries both on Plato and on Hippocrates, the 
 founder of Greek Medical Science, whose works, in 
 the Ionic dialect, belong to the close of the 5th cen- 
 
152 GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 tury B.C. Galen's distinctive aim was to place medical 
 science on a psychological basis by studying the 
 affections of the body in connexion with those of the 
 soul. Athenaeus (190 a.d.) represents a new and 
 popular form of learned work. In his Doctors at Dinner 
 (Deipnosophistae, in 15 books) he gives us a miscellany 
 under the form of a conversation, which ranges over 
 everything from Homer to cucumbers; — literature, 
 natural history, medicine, manners, grammar. The 
 work conveys some idea of the loss suffered by the 
 destruction of the Alexandrian library. At least 700 
 authors are named who would otherwise be unknown. 
 The Stratagems of Polyaenus (170 a.d.) illustrate, by 
 more than 800 anecdotes, the art of generalship, and 
 occasionally of statecraft. From Aelian (220 a.d.) 
 we have a large collection of miscellaneous gleanings 
 in history, biography and archaeology. The Selections 
 and Anthology of" Stobaeus (480 a.d.) form another 
 example; and a peculiarly valuable one is supplied, in 
 the Byzantine age, by the Library of the Patriarch 
 Photius. 
 
 9. Rhetoric was reduced to a complete system 
 by Hermogenes (170 a.d.). His work was long the 
 standard text-book of an art which employed the best 
 energies of the age. Early in the fourth century, how- 
 ever, it found a rival in the treatise of Aphthonius, 
 which, at the Revival of Letters, once more became a 
 favourite manual. Cassius Longinus (260 a.d.), one 
 of the most accomplished Greeks of the third cen- 
 tury, and minister of Queen Zenobia at Palmyra, 
 has left a treatise on Rhetoric. To him is ascribed, 
 though doubtfully, the essay On Sublimity, one of the 
 best pieces of literary criticism in the language. From 
 the end of the first century a.d. rhetorical eminence 
 became the chief road to public distinction. Chairs 
 of Rhetoric were posts of peculiar honour in the 
 great cities of Asia and Europe. ' Even Thule,' cries 
 Juvenal, 'talks of engaging an orator.' 
 
chap, ii.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. 153 
 
 10. Public teachers of Rhetoric were now offi- 
 cially distinguished by the name of Sophist, an old 
 term revived in a special sense as an academic title, 
 nearly equivalent, at this period, to the medieval 
 'doctor.' We have specimens of this new oratory 
 from such writers as Dion Chrysostom at the close 
 of the first century; from Aelius Aristeides in 
 the second ; and, in the fourth, from Themistius, 
 Himerius and Libanius: of whom the two last num- 
 bered among their pupils the Christian Fathers 
 Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil and Chrysostom. The 
 writings of another famous rhetorician of the second 
 century, Herodes Atticus, are lost. Libanius gives 
 us some curious glimpses of University life at Athens 
 and at Antioch. ' Some of them,' he says — referring to 
 his disciples at Antioch — ' stand like statues, with their 
 arms folded on each other ; others sit stock still, un- 
 moved by my strokes of brilliancy or wit. Some try 
 to interrupt those who feel stirred. Others vacantly 
 count the numbers in the room ; or stare at the trees 
 that grow outside.' At Athens the students were or- 
 ganised in factions, and carried off a new comer by 
 force to their favourite Sophist, 
 
 11. Rhetorical studies further helped to form an 
 ornate literary prose, which took various light forms. 
 Lucian (160 a.d.), a native of Samosata on the 
 Euphrates, lived to write Attic prose which, though 
 by no means faultless, was the best that had been 
 written for 400 years. His Dialogues of the Gods, 
 almost Homeric in their freshness and almost Aristo- 
 phanic in their fun, bring out the ludicrous side of the 
 popular Greek faith ; the Dialogues of the Dead are 
 brilliant satires on the living. In his Auction of Philo- 
 sophers the gods knock down each of the great 
 thinkers to the highest bidder; Socrates goes for 
 about £500; Aristotle for a fifth of that sum. In 
 another piece, Lucian himself is tried for this jest- 
 ing; but is acquitted, with the approval. of Plato and 
 
154 GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 others. Much historical interest belongs to his sketch 
 of Peregrinus, a man whom he represents as having 
 been a Christian. Lucian notices several traits in the 
 'strange philosophy' of the Christians; their hope of 
 immortality and their patience unto death ; their hold- 
 ing of their goods in common; and their teaching 
 that all men are brothers. His Timon, the misan- 
 thrope, is interesting in connexion with Shakspere's 
 play. The Veracious History, a mock narrative of 
 travel, is the original of such books as Gulliver's 
 Travels. Lucian has much in common with Swift, 
 and more, perhaps, with Voltaire. 
 
 12. The Emperor Julian {b. 331 — d. 363 a.d.) 
 claims mention here, less for his extant orations or 
 addresses than for his satirical pieces. His Emperors, 
 or the Banquet, is a criticism, in the form of a dialogue, 
 on his predecessors, in which Marcus Aurelius is ex- 
 tolled and Constantine disparaged. The Misopogon, 
 or Beard-Hater, is a satire levelled at the people of 
 Antioch, who during a visit of Julian had insulted 
 the opinions, and even the beard, of their sovereign. 
 
 13. The Greek Romance, or Novel, originated 
 not later than the age of Augustus, and had two chief 
 lines of descent. One of these was purely Greek, and 
 is represented by Xenophon the Ephesian (probably 
 not later than 360 a.d.) in his elegant but somewhat 
 frigid Tale of Ephesus, the love-story of Anthia and 
 Habrocomes ; and by the charming pastoral romance, 
 Daphnis and C/iloe, which bears the name of Longus. 
 The other series was influenced, through Syria, by 
 oriental and especially by Indian fiction. Its best 
 representative is Heliodorus (390 a.d.). His Tale 
 of Aethiopia relates the fortunes of Chariclea, a 
 priestess at Delphi, and Theagenes, a Thessalian with 
 whom she flies to Egypt. After many perils and sepa- 
 rations they reach Aethiopia, and are on the point of 
 being immolated to the sun and moon, when it is 
 discovered that Chariclea is the daughter of the 
 
chap. II.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. 155 
 
 Aethiopian king, — having, by a miracle, been born 
 white ; and the union of the lovers is followed by the 
 introduction of a more humane religion. Achilles 
 Tatius and Chariton were inferior followers of 
 Heliodorus. 
 
 14. Three books of fictitious Letters, written with 
 vivacity in an artificial Attic style, bear the name of 
 Alciphron (about 180 a.d.). They represent a kind 
 of literature popular from the beginning of the second 
 century, and derive much of their material from the 
 New Attic Comedy. 
 
 15. As the early Church grew in social power, it 
 began to desire a counterpoise for the light literature 
 of paganism. Christian Greek Romances, often 
 written by Greek converts, were numerous from the 
 beginning of the fourth century. Some of these 
 romances related martyrdoms, historical or fictitious. 
 Others were tales of monastic life. Others were 
 imaginary journeys, — such as the 'Voyage of Ma- 
 carius to Paradise.' Others ' had a controversial 
 purpose. Thus Abraham the Jew atid the Merchant 
 Theodore was a plea for the worship of images. 
 Theodore, ruined by a shipwreck and repulsed by his 
 friends, borrows money from Abraham, invoking, as 
 his only security, the great Christ set up by Constan- 
 tine in the copper-market before the palace at 
 Byzantium. Again Theodore loses all, and again the 
 Jew trusts him. Theodore sails westward, and this 
 time prospers. Wishing to repay Abraham, but find- 
 ing no messenger, he puts the money in a box, and 
 commits it, in the name of Christ, to the waves. It is 
 washed to the feet of the Jew on the shore of the Sea 
 of Marmora. But, when Theodore returns, Abraham, 
 to try him, feigns that he has not received it. Theo- 
 dore requires him to make oath before the Christ 
 And as Theodore, standing before the image, passion- 
 ately prays, the heart of his benefactor is turned to 
 faith in the surety of the friendless. 
 
 14 
 
156 GREEK LITERATURE. [part 111. 
 
 16. Philosophy, during these centuries, is re- 
 presented chiefly by the Stoics and the Neoplatonists. 
 The Stoic School, with its unbroken Greek tradition 
 from the beginning of the third century B.C., was dis- 
 tinguished under the Empire as that School which 
 most earnestly sought to find a practical rule of life. 
 
 17. Epictetus, born at the Phrygian Hierapolis 
 (a place mentioned by St Paul in his Epistle to the 
 Church of the neighbouring Colossae) was the sickly, 
 deformed slave of Epaphroditus, a profligate and cruel 
 freedman of Nero, afterwards put to death by Do- 
 mitian for having done Nero the service of helping 
 him to kill himself. There is a story of the master 
 twisting the leg of his slave Epictetus, who said, ' If 
 you go on, you will break it ; ' he did go on, and did 
 break it, when Epictetus merely said, 'I told you 
 so.' Later in life, Epictetus somehow got his free- 
 dom. He was driven from Rome by the edict of 
 Domitian banishing philosophers in 94 a.d., and 
 retired to Nicopolis in Epeirus, where Arrian was his 
 pupil, and took the notes from which, nearly in his 
 master's words, he has given us the Discourses of 
 Epictetus (once in 8, now in 4 books), and the Manual, 
 a summary. 
 
 The philosophy of Epictetus is Stoic with Socratic 
 elements. Confining his attention to practical Ethics, 
 he teaches that the beginning of wisdom is to 
 discern between what is, and what is not, in our 
 own power. The one thing which is in our power 
 is to judge rightly — with the aid of a Guiding 
 Spirit placed in us by God — concerning appearances 
 (phantasiae), and so to secure our happiness by living 
 in accord with Nature, that is, in accord with the 
 divine order of the universe. Not in our power are 
 all external things, such as poverty, failure, death. 
 These things we must meet calmly. And we must 
 abstain from all things likely to weaken the soul's 
 power over the one thing which it can control. Hence 
 
chap. II.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. 157 
 
 the rule — ' Bear and forbear? Epictetus does not ex- 
 press belief in a future life. He holds that well-doing is 
 its own reward. Man, he teaches, should always be 
 content, knowing that God chooses for men better than 
 they could themselves. ' In the place of all other de- 
 lights substitute this, — that of being conscious that you 
 are obeying God.' God brings man into life : ' and 
 when he leads you out — after seeing the spectacle and 
 the solemnity — will you not go out with adoration of 
 him, and thanks for what you have seen and heard?' 
 
 1 8. As Epictetus dwelt rather on the moral dignity 
 of man, so the Emperor Marcus Aurelius Anto- 
 ninus (121 — 180 a.d.) dwelt especially upon his 
 need of divine support. Twelve books, written in 
 Greek, contain the thoughts which he set down 
 from time to time, and which are usually called 
 his 'Meditations.' They do not show the Greek 
 feeling for the beauty of goodness ; they have not the 
 subtle religious sense of the Hebrews ; but they ex- 
 press, without enthusiasm, a humble and unfaltering 
 reliance on a Providence which orders human affairs. 
 In this religious philosophy God is at once a person 
 and a law. He dwells in the human reason ; man's 
 first duty is to obey this divinity, this ' ruling faculty ' 
 within him, — to keep it free from violence, above 
 pains and pleasures ; awaiting death as a breaking up 
 of the elements that form man. Nothing can be 
 evil that is 'according to Nature,' that is, according 
 to God. Forgive injuries ; all men are brethren ; 
 each must love and cherish the rest, and try to make 
 them better, even when they wish him evil. The best 
 revenge is, not to be like the wrong doer. This 
 creed sustained Marcus Aurelius under domestic trial, 
 and when, amid war and pestilence, he saw the Em- 
 pire declining: nor should it be forgotten that he, like 
 Epictetus, shows no clear hope of another life. 
 
 19. While Stoicism was thus pre-eminently a moral 
 guide, Neoplatonism strove to seize the essence of 
 
158 GREEK LITERATURE. [part hi. 
 
 knowledge and of existence. The oriental element 
 traceable in Plato was developed at Alexandria, largely 
 under Jewish influences, into a mystic doctrine. By as- 
 cetic discipline and intense contemplation the soul may 
 achieve complete abstraction from the world of the 
 senses, and may attain to complete union (heliosis) 
 with God, the source of all knowledge. This doc- 
 trine, defined by Numenius (150 a.d.) and developed 
 by Ammonius Saccas, was expounded in writing by 
 the pupil of the latter, Plotinus (240 a. d.), who 
 claimed inspiration and miraculous power, and averred 
 that, four times during his life, in ecstatic trance, he 
 had risen to the union with deity. His disciple and 
 editor Porphyrv, and the pupil of the latter, Iambli- 
 chus, a mystic who forestalled the extravagance of 
 a dervish, continued the laborious enthusiasm. It 
 found a more gifted witness in the beautiful and 
 noble-hearted Hypatia, who was cruelly murdered by 
 the fanatic mob of Alexandria in 415 a.d. 
 
 20. In the fifth century calmer minds, still to be 
 found in the School of Athens, made a last effort 
 to rally the forces of Greek wisdom. Proclus (450 
 a.d.) sought to combine whatever was scientific 
 in the conceptions of Neoplatonism with the best 
 elements of earlier systems. The attempt failed : and 
 his followers were equally unsuccessful. The victory 
 of Christianity over the thought of the age was already 
 all but complete when the edict of Justinian formally 
 closed the schools of heathen philosophy (529 a.d.). 
 
 it. Meanwhile, for seven hundred years, the 
 higher Poetry had been almost silent. Babrius 
 (40 a.d.) put into choliambic verse the Fables ascribed 
 to Aesop, whose legendary date is about 560 B.C., but 
 from whom we have no authentic remains. Plato de- 
 scribes Socrates in prison amusing himself by putting 
 such fables into verse. 'The Wolf and the Lamb' is a 
 fair sample of the skill of Babrius, who was freely 
 translated into Latin by Phaedrus. Oppian (180 a.d.) 
 
chap, ii.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. 159 
 
 wrote the Fisher's Art (Halieutica), a clever epic of 
 the didactic sort in 5 books, on the habits of fish and 
 the modes of capturing them. He is also the reputed 
 author of the epic on Hunting (Cynegetica), in 4 books, 
 — greatly inferior to the other, but with some good 
 descriptions. Buffon consulted it. Nonnus, early in 
 the fifth century, gave epic poetry a short, flickering life; 
 his huge epic On the Adventures of Dionysus is a ro- 
 mance of physical nature, — fervent, but often turgid, 
 and showing an Egyptian taste for crude colour. Quin- 
 tus Smyrnaeus (450 a.d.) wrote a sequel to the Iliad 
 in 14 books, carrying it down to the capture of 
 Troy ; and though devoid of poetical originality, is of 
 value for the study of Homer. Under the name of 
 Musaeus (500 a.d. ?) we have 340 verses, of much 
 beauty, on the story of Leander swimming the Helles- 
 pont to see Hero. 
 
 22. Poetry of a mystic character forms a special 
 province of the later Greek verse. The Argonautica 
 (which must be distinguished from the poem of Apol- 
 lonius Rhodius) is an epic in 1384 lines, written pro- 
 bably in Egypt before 400 a.d., and treating select 
 incidents in the voyage of Jason. Orpheus, bard, 
 prophet and enchanter, is the central figure : his 
 mysterious power over the world of gods, spirits and 
 men is the central motive of the whole. The Lithica, 
 in 768 hexameters, composed probably soon after the 
 death of Julian in 363 a.d., celebrates the talismanic 
 properties of rare or precious stones, and vindicates 
 magic science from the disrepute into which it is 
 falling. The eighty-seven Hymns, sometimes styled 
 'Orphic,' can have nothing in common with the 
 Orphic hymns which old Greek writers mention in 
 connexion with an Orphic ritual. The hymns in our 
 collection represent the tendency of the later Neopla- 
 tonists to resolve the old Greek deities into abstract or 
 mystic formulas ; and few of them, perhaps, are older 
 than 350 a.d. 
 
160 GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 23. The Greek Anthology brings together epi- 
 grams and short pieces ranging over about 1000 years, 
 — from Simonides of Ceos (490 B.C.) to the sixth century 
 of our era. Maximus Planudes, a monk of Constan- 
 tinople (1330 a.d.), put together a collection, founded 
 on that of Agathias (550 a.d.), in seven books. This 
 was the only one till, in 1606, the scholar Saumaise, 
 better known as Salmasius, found a manuscript in the 
 library of the Elector Palatine at Heidelberg, contain- 
 ing another Greek Anthology, put together by Con- 
 stantinus Cephalas, about 920 a.d. This is now known 
 as the Palatine Anthology ; and it is now seen that 
 Planudes had, in large measure, merely rearranged or 
 abridged it. Love, art, mourning for the dead, the 
 whole range of human interests and sympathies, lend 
 leaves to this garland of Greek song. 
 
 24. Early Christian writers occasionally quote the 
 Sibylline Oracles, regarding these, apparently, as 
 genuine utterances of a heathen prophetess who some- 
 times became the involuntary mouth-piece of divine 
 truth. Sibyl (usually explained as ' Counsel of Zeus') 
 was a name given by the Greeks to an inspired being 
 with various local habitations. The mosaic pavement 
 of the Cathedral at Siena represents the whole series of 
 famous Sibyls, and illustrates the recognition accorded 
 by the earlier Church to this pagan vehicle of revela- 
 tion — whose testimony the old funeral hymn, 'Dies 
 irae,' associated with that of David. The 'Sibylline 
 Books' of Rome — said to have been brought by the 
 Sibyl to Tarquin, and consulted in times of difficulty by 
 the Senate — were destroyed by fire in 82 b.c. A new 
 collection was then put together from Sibylline books 
 preserved in other places. This second collection, 
 after several revisions, was finally burned in the reign 
 of Honorius (395 — 423 a.d.) The existing ' Oracles,' 
 in Greek hexameter verse, are by Jewish or Christian 
 writers, ranging in date from about 170 B.C. to 700 
 a.d., who seem to have aimed at reproducing certain 
 
CHAP, ii.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. 161 
 
 traits of style or form — such as the use of acrostics — 
 which belonged to the old Sibylline oracles. We have 
 twelve of the fourteen books once extant: books ix. 
 and x. are lost. The third and fifth books express, in 
 the form of prophecy, the Jewish longing — quickened 
 by the visible decline of Hellenism under Alexander's 
 successors — for a political Restorer of Israel. Other 
 books predict the history of the world from the Flood 
 (in i. and II., probably the latest of all, the Sibyl is 
 the daughter-in-law of Noah), — foretell the triumph 
 of Christianity, — and allude to the belief that Christ 
 shall reign on earth for a thousand years. 
 
 25. As the literature of Greek culture had gra- 
 dually lost its significance, a constantly greater import- 
 ance had accrued to the Greek Literature of 
 Christianity, represented by the Epistles, Homilies 
 and learned works of the Fathers, and by Ecclesias- 
 tical Histories such as those of Eusebius, Socrates 
 and Sozomen. The relations between the declining 
 and the rising literature passed through two great 
 phases. The Christian writers who immediately suc- 
 ceeded the Apostolic age, true to its example, had not 
 ignored either the humanising value of Greek letters 
 or the theological interest of Greek thought. Justin 
 Martyr, Origen and, above all, Clement of Alexandria 
 had in their different ways claimed recognition for 
 the endeavours of the Greek search after truth. 
 
 26. But towards' the end of the third century a 
 different spirit began to appear. While Neoplatonists 
 like Plotinus alleged that philosophy had anticipated 
 revelation, Christian writers like Eusebius maintained 
 that whatever was good in Greek thought had come to 
 it through the Hebrew Scriptures. The progressive 
 estrangement of the Christian laity from Greek letters, 
 and the divergence of spoken from written Greek at 
 Constantinople, were the two great causes which in 
 the fourth century hastened the decay of literary 
 Hellenism. Yet the greatest Christian Fathers of that 
 
1 62 GREEK LITERATURE. [part in. 
 
 century, Gregory of Nazianzus, Basil, his brother 
 Gregory of Nyssa, and Chrysostom were trained by 
 Greek masters in the art of expression — that art in 
 which all men still felt the power of ancient Greece ; 
 and the matured eloquence of the preacher first issued 
 from the schools of Antioch and Athens. 
 
 27. In the Christian Greek Literature of the 
 Middle or Byzantine period (529 — 1453 a.d.) the 
 classical beauty of form and purity of style disappear. 
 Learned writers, generally ecclesiastics, compile an- 
 nals, works on Grammar, Mathematics, Medicine, 
 miscellanies or criticisms of the Old Literature ; while 
 by the side of these labours a school of popular 
 poetry at last springs up, — unlike the classical poetry 
 in form and spirit, — and links the Medieval on to the 
 Modern Literature. 
 
 For 350 years after the capture of Constantinople 
 by the Ottoman Turks (1453) the Greeks had small 
 hope of regaining independence. Their efforts were 
 concentrated on doing what they could to save their 
 nationality from being effaced : above all, on pre- 
 serving the two things by which it was chiefly marked 
 — their language and their religion. Hence the Greek 
 literature of those centuries was mainly occupied 
 either with philological studies of the old Greek 
 writers, or with Theology. Gennadius, the first Patri- 
 arch after the Turkish conquest, founded at Con- 
 stantinople a 'National School' which did much to 
 keep alive the higher culture through a difficult time, 
 and which, before 1700, had become famous. From 
 1 7 16 onwards the Sultans appointed Fanariots — i.e. 
 Greeks of Constantinople, so called from the quarter 
 of the city in which they lived — to govern the two 
 Rouman Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia; 
 and the courts of these Fanariot princes became 
 centres of encouragement for Greek literary effort. 
 
 Then, at the beginning of this century, hopes of 
 freedom began to stir. Far-seeing friends of Greece 
 
chap, ii.] FROM AUGUSTUS TO JUSTINIAN. 163 
 
 such as Koraes helped to restore the purity and vigour 
 of the language, and so to render it a more efficient 
 instrument of national regeneration. A new literary 
 energy set in. From 1800 to 182 1 this had chiefly 
 a preparatory purpose : there was not as yet a social 
 life to which it could be practically applied. The War 
 of Independence, which began in 182 1, led in 1827 to 
 some — not all — of the Greeks becoming free. Liberated 
 Greece had first to organise education : the next im- 
 pulse was to make up lost way by translating foreign 
 books into Greek. During the last fifty years Greek 
 writers have contributed to almost every province of 
 letters, especially to Philology, Archaeology and His- 
 tory: and there is good reason to hope that the literature 
 of Greece — in its recovered vigour, still so young — will 
 continue to enrich the language that it inherits 1 . 
 
 28. The great original work of the Greek mind 
 in art and literature had been done before 300 b.c. 
 But a wider, if a less brilliant, activity remained for it. 
 Rome, as a Roman poet says, made the whole earth 
 to be one people. And as this was done by the 
 military and political genius of Rome, so, within the 
 iron framework which she wrought, a universal 
 culture was animated by the elastic intelligence and 
 interpreted by the flexible language of Greece. From 
 Rome, along with a noble literature, the modern 
 world derives a continuous tradition of law and 
 government : from Greece it traces the ancient 
 lineage and the still fresh inspirations of an intellec- 
 tual and spiritual life. 
 
 1 An excellent survey of the period from 1453 to the 
 present day will be found in the ' History of Neo-hellenic Litera- 
 ture' by A. R. Rangabe' (Berlin, 1877). 
 

 A 
 O 
 (0 
 
 o 
 
 J. 
 
 o 
 
 C 
 
 O 
 
 
 • 
 
 Thales. 
 Pythagoras. 
 
 Xenophanes. 
 
 Parmenides. 
 Empedocles. 
 Anaxagoras. 
 
 Plato. 
 Aristotle. 
 
 
 
 Antiphon. 
 Andocides. 
 
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Some English Translations of Greek Authors. 
 
 ( Where more than one Translation of the same work is named, the 
 order is alphabetical.) 
 
 Homer, Iliad, Lord Derby. Pope. Odyssey, Worsley. 
 Hesiod, T. Cooke (fi756). Theognis, Frere. Pindar, Baring. 
 Morice. E. Myers. Aeschylus, Miss Swanwick. Agamemnon, 
 Robert Browning. Fitzgerald. Milman. Prometheus, Mrs 
 Webster. Sophocles, L. Campbell. Plumptre. Euripides, 
 R. Potter (ti8o 4 ). Bacchae, Milman. Thorold Rogers. E. S. 
 Shuckburgh. Medea, Mrs Webster. Alcestis, in 'Balaustion', 
 Robert Browning. Hecuba ('A Trojan Queen's Revenge'), 
 Beesley. Aristophanes, Acharnians, Knights, Birds, Frogs, 
 Peace, Frere. Birds, B. H. Kennedy. Peace, Wasps, Rogers. 
 Herodotus, Rawlinson. Thucy aides, Crawley. Dale. Demos- 
 thenes, C. R. Kennedy. Plato, Jowett. Gorgias, Cope. 
 Republic, Davies and Vaughan. Aristotle, Ethics, Williams. 
 Organon, Poste. Poetics, Twining. Politics, Books i. III. iv. 
 (vil.), Bolland, with Essays by Lang. Theocritus, Calverley. 
 Bion, Moschus, Apollonius Rhodius, Husaeus, F. Fawkes 
 (+1777). Plutarch, Lives, Clough. North. Moralia, Goodwin. 
 Epictetus {Discourses, Manual and fragments), George Long. 
 The Thoughts of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, George Long. 
 
 As special Introductions to Greek Authors the volumes in 
 the series of 'Ancient Classics for English Readers/ edited by 
 the Rev. W. Lucas Collins, can be recommended. 
 
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 of letters or isolated letters. 
 
 3. The movement drill ; 
 whereby pupils acquire with 
 certainty the real writing move- 
 ment. 
 
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 writing, which leads a pupil to 
 draw, rather than to write. 
 
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 by the scope of movement en- 
 ables the pupil to gradually and 
 naturally acquire the fcre-arm 
 movement. 
 
 6. Better gradation than is 
 found in any other series. 
 
 7. They are in accordance 
 with the modern methods of 
 teaching. 
 
 This system, thus dealing with whole letters, words, and 
 sentences, rapidly advances the pupil by steps that are natural, 
 progressive, graded, clear, and attractive. 
 
 INTRODUCTORY PRICES. 
 Lead-Pencil Course, Three Numbers, per dozen 
 Short Course, Tracing, Two Numbers, " " 
 Short Course, Seven Numbers, " " 
 
 Grammar Course, Seven Numbers, " " 
 
 , 84 cents. 
 , 84 " 
 . 84 " 
 81 20 
 
 Sample Copies of either Series will be forwarded, post-paid, for ex- 
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BOTANICAL WORKS. 
 
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 $15.75. Key to do. 25 cents. 
 
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 Forming a volume in the "Science Primers." 18mo. 
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 With numerous Illustrations. 12mo. 1C7 pages. 85 
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WORKS OF ARABELLA B. BUCKLEY7 
 
 The Winners in Life's Race; 
 
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 Life and Her Children. 
 
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