IV
THE SONG
The Personal Song — Sappho, Algous, Anacreon
The Song proper, the Greek ' Melos,' falls into two
divisions — the personal song of the poet, and the choric
son^ of his band of trained dancers. There are remains
of old popular songs with no alleged author, in various
styles : the Mill Song — a mere singing to while away
time — ^^ Grind, Mill, grind; Even Pittacus grinds ; Who
is king of the great Mytilene " ; — the Spinning Song and
the Wine- Press Song, and the Szv allow Song, with
which the Rhodian boys went round begging in early
spring. Rather higher than these were the * Skolia,'
songs sung at banquets or wine-parties. The form
gave rise to a special Skolion-tune, with the four -line
verse and the syllable-counting which characterises the
Lesbian lyric. The Skolion on Harmodius and Aristo-
geiton is the most celebrated ; but nearly all our remains
are fine work, and the " Ah^ Leipsydrion, false to them
zvho loved thee," the song of the exiles who fled from
the tyrant Pisistratus to the rock of that name, is full of
a haunting beauty.
The Lesbian ' Melos ' culminates in two great names,
Alca3us and Sappho, at the end of the seventh century.^
^ The dates are uncertain. Athens can scarcely have possessed Sigeum
before the reign of Pisistratus. Beloch, Griechische Geschichte, i, 330.
90
ALCiEUS OF LESBOS 91
The woman has surpassed the man, if not in poetical
achievement, at least in her effect on the imagination
of after ages. A whole host of poetesses sprang up
in different parts of Greece after her — Corinna and
Myrtis in Boeotia, Telesilla in Argos, Praxilla in Sikyon ;
while Erinna, writing in the fourth century, still calls
herself a 'comrade' of Sappho.
Alc^uS spent his life in wars, first against Athens
for the possession of Sigeum, where, like Archilochus,
he left his shield for the enemy to dedicate to Athena ;
then against the democratic tyrant Melanchros and
his successor Myrsilos. At last the Lesbians stopped
the civil strife by appointing Pittacus, the * Wise Man,'
dictator, and Alcaeus left the island for fifteen years.
He served as a soldier of fortune in Egypt and else-
where : his brother Antimenidas took service with
Nebuchadnezzar, and killed a Jewish or Egyptian giant
in single combat. Eventually the poet was pardoned
and invited home. His works filled ten books in
Alexandria ; they were all * occasional poetry,' hymns,
political party-songs {cnacnwriKo), drinking-songs, and
love-songs. His strength seems to have lain in the
political and personal reminiscences, the "hardships of
travel, banishment, and war," that Horace speaks of.
Sappho and Alcaeus are often represented together on
vases, and the idea of a romance between them was
inevitable. Tradition gives a little address of his in
a Sapphic metre, ''Thou violet - crowned, pure, softly-
smiling Sappho^' and an answer from Sappho in Alcaics
— a delicate mutual compliment. Every line of Alcaeus
has charm. The stanza called after him is a magni-
ficent metrical invention. His language is spontaneous
and musical ; it seems to come straight from a heart as
92 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
full as that of Archilochus, but much more generous.
He is a fiery yEolian noble, open-handed, free-drinking,
frank, and passionate ; and though he fought to order in
case of need, he seems never to have written to order.
His younger contemporary Sappho — the name is
variously spelt ; there is authority for Psappha, Psaffo,
and even Pspha— born at Ephesus, dwelling at Mitylene,
shared the political fortunes of Alcaeus's party. We hear
of a husband, whose name, Kerkylas of Andros, is not
above suspicion ; and of a daughter Kleis, whose existence
is perhaps erroneously inferred from a poem — '^ I have a
fair little child, ivith a shape like a golden flower^ Kleis, my
darling!' She seems to have been the leader of a band
of literary women, students and poetesses, held together
by strong ties of intimacy and affection. It is compared
in antiquity ^ to the circle of Socrates. Sappho wrote in
the most varied styles — there are fifty different metres
in our scanty remains of her — but all bear a strong
impress of personal character. By the side of Alcasus,
one feels her to be a woman. Her dialect is more the
native speech of Mitylene, where she lived ; his the more
literary. His interests cover war and drinking and
adventure and politics ; hers are all in personal feeling,
mostly tender and introspective. Her suggestions of
nature — the line, "/ heard the footfall of the flowery
spring" ; the marvellously musical comparison, ^^ Like
the one sweet apple very red, tip high on the highest bough,
that the apple-gatherers have forgotten ; no, not forgotten,
bnt could never reach so far" — are perhaps more definitely
beautiful than the love-poems which have made Sappho's
name immortal. Two of these are preserved by accident ;
the rest of Sappho's poetry was publicly burned in 1073
^ Maximus Tyrius,
SAPPHO OF LESBOS 93
at Rome and at Constantinople, as being too much for the
shaky morals of the time. One must not over-estimate
the compliments of gallantry which Sappho had in plenty :
she was ' the Poetess ' as Homer was * the Poet ' ; she
was ' the Tenth Muse,' ' the Pierian Bee ' ; the wise
Solon wished to " learn a song of Sappho's and then die."
Still Sappho was known and admired all over Greece
soon after her death ; and a dispassionate judgment
must see that her love-poetry, if narrow in scope, has
unrivalled splendour of expression for the longing that
is too intense to have any joy in it, too serious to allow
room for metaphor and imaginative ornament. Unfor-
tunately, the dispassionate judgment is scarcely to be
had. Later antiquity could not get over its curiosity at
the woman who was not a 'Hetaira' and yet published
passionate love-poetry. She had to be made a heroine
of romance. For instance, she once mentioned the Rock
of Leucas. That was enough ! It was the rock from
which certain saga-heroes had leaped to their death, and
she must have done the same, doubtless from unrequited
passion ! Then came the deference of gallantry, the
reckless merriment of the Attic comedy, and the defiling
imagination of Rome. It is a little futile to discuss the
private character of a woman who lived two thousand
five hundred years ago in a society of which we have
almost no records. It is clear that Sappho was a * respect-
able person ' in Lesbos ; and there is no good early
evidence to show that the Lesbian standard was low.
Her extant poemiS address her women friends with a
passionate intensity ; but there are dozens of questions
to be solved before these poems can be used as evidence :
Is a given word-form correct ? is Sappho speaking in her
own person, or dramatically ? what occasion are the
8
94 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
verses written for ? how far is the poem a Hterary exer-
cise based on the odes written by Alcaeus to his squire
Lykos, or by Theognis to Kyrnus ?
No one need defend the character of Anacreon of
Teos ; though, since he Hved in good society to the age
of eighty-five, he cannot have been as bad as he wishes
us to beheve. His poetry is derived from the Lesbians
and from the SkoHa of his countryman Pythermus.
He was driven from Teos by the Persian conquest
of 545 B.C. ; he settled in Abdera, a Teian colony in
Thrace ; saw some fighting, in which, he carefully ex-
plains, he disgraced himself quite as much as Alcaeus and
Archilochus ; finally, he attached himself to various royal
persons, Polycrates in Samos, Hipparchus in Athens, and
Echekrates the Aleuad in Thessaly. The Alexandrians
had five books of his elegies, epigrams, iambics, and
songs ; we possess one satirical fragment, and a good
number of wine and love songs, addressed chiefly to his
squire Bathyllus. They were very popular and gave rise
to many imitations at all periods of literature ; we possess
a series of such Anacreontea, dating from various times
between the third century B.C. and the Renaissance. These
poems are innocent of fraud : in one, for instance (No. i),
Anacreon appears to the writer in a dream ^ ; in most of
them the poet merely assumes the mask of Anacreon and
sings his love-songs to ' a younger Bathyllus.' The
dialect, the treatment of Eros as a frivolous fat boy, the
personifications, the descriptions of works of art, all are
marks of a later age. Yet there can be no doubt of the
extraordinary charm of these poems, true and false alike.
Anacreon stands out among Greek writers for his limpid
ease of rhythm, thought, and expression. A child can
^ Cf. 20 and 59.
ANACREON OF TEOS 95
understand him, and he ripples into music. But the
false poems are even more Anacreontic than Anacreon.
Compared with them the real Anacreon has great variety
of theme and of metre, and even some of the stateliness
and reserved strength of the sixth century. Very likely
our whole conception of the man would be higher, were
it not for the incessant imitations which have fixed him
as a type of the festive and amorous septuagenarian.
These three poets represent the personal lyric of
Greece. In Alc^us it embraces all sides of an adven-
turous and perhaps patriotic life ; in Sappho it expresses
with a burning intensity the inner life, the passions that
are generally silent ; in Anacreon it spreads out into
light snatches of song about simple enjoyments, sensual
and imaginative. The personal lyric never reached the
artistic grandeur, the religious and philosophic depth
of the choric song. It is significant of our difficulty in
really appreciating Greek poetry, that we are usually so
much more charmed by the style which all antiquity
counted as easier and lower.
The Choir-Song — General
Besides the personal lyric, there had existed in Greece
at a time earlier than our earliest records the practice of
celebrating important occasions by the dance and song
of a choir. The occasion might of course be public
or private ; it was always in early times more or less
religious — a victory, a harvest, a holy day, a birth, death,
or marriage. At the time that we first know the choir-
song it always implies a professional poet, a band of
professional performers, and generally a new production
96 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
— new dance, new music, new words — for each new
occasion. Also, it is international. The great lyric poets
are from Lesbos, Italian Locri, Rhegion, Keos, Boeotia ;
the earliest is actually said to be a Lydian. A poet can
even send his composition across the sea to be repre-
sented, secure of having trained performers in another
country who will understand the dancing and singing.
The dialect is correspondingly international. It has
.^olic, ' Epic,' and Doric elements, the proportions vary-
ing slightly in various writers. These facts suffice to
show that the choir-poem which we get even in Alcman,
much more that of Simonides, is a highly-developed pro-
duct. Our chief extant specimens, the prize-songs of
Pindar, represent the extreme fulness of bloom upon
which decay already presses.
What is the history implied in this mixture of dia-
lects ? The ^olic is the language of song, because of
Sappho and Alcceus. No singer followed them who
was not under their spell. The ' Epic ' element comes
from the 'Homer' which had by this time grown to be
the common property of Greece.^ The Doric element
needs explanation.
The poets, as we have seen, were not especially
Dorian ; but the patrons of the poetry were, and so to
a great extent was its spirit. It was the essence of the
Ionian and ^olian culture to have set the individual
free ; the Dorian kept him, even in poetry, subordinated
to a larger whole, took no interest in his private feelings,
but required him to express the emotions of the com-
munity. The earliest choir-poets, Alcman and Tisias,
^ What this ' Homer ' dialect was in Boeotia, or Lesbos, or Argos, we are
not aide to say. The ' Epic ' element in our lyric remains has been Ionised and
Atticised just as the Iliad has been.
THE CHOIR SONG: PATRONAGE 97
were probably public servants, working for their re-
spective states. That is one Dorian element in the
choir-song. Another is that, as soon as it ceases to
be genuinely the performance by the community of a
public duty, it becomes a professional entertainment for
the pleasure of a patron who pays. The non-choral poets,
Alcajus, Sappho, Archilochus, wrote to please themselves ;
they were 'their own,' as Aristotle puts it, and did not
become aXXov, 'another's.' Anacreon lived at courts
and must really have depended on patronage ; but his
poems are ostensibly written at his own pleasure, not at
the bidding of Polycrates. The training of a professional
chorus, however, means expense, and expense means
a patron who pays. Pindar and Simonides with their
trained bands of dancers could only exist in dependence
on the rich oligarchies.
The richest Ionian state, Athens, looked askance at
this late development. Her dithyrambs and tragedies
were not composed to the order of a man, nor exe-
cuted by hired performers ; they were solemnly acted
by free citizens in the service of the great Demos. Occa-
sionally a very rich citizen might have a dithyramb
performed for him, like a Dorian noble ; but even
Megacles, who employed Pindar, cuts a modest and
economical figure by the side of the ^ginetans and
the royalties ; and the custom was not common in
Athens. Alcibiades employed Euripides for a dithy-
ramb, but that was part of his ostentatious munifi-
cence. The Ionian states in general were either too
weak or too democratic to exercise much influence on
the professional choir-song.
The choir-song formed a special branch of literature
with a unity of its own, but it had no one name. Aris-
98 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
totle often uses the special name ' dithyramb ' to denote
the whole genus ; this is a popular extension of meaning,
influenced by the growth of the later Attic dithyramb
in the hands of Timotheos and Philoxenos. Even the
names of the different kinds of choir-song are vague.
When Alexandrian scholars collected the scattered works
of Pindar or Simonides, they needed some principle of
arrangement and division. Thus, according to the
subjects, we have drink-songs, marriage-songs, dirges,
victory-songs, &c.; or, by the composition of the choirs,
maiden-songs, boy-songs, man-songs ; or, from another
point of view again, standing songs, marching-songs,
dancing-songs. Then there come individual names,
not in any classification : a * paean ' is a hymn to Apollo ;
a * dithyramb,' to Dionysus ; an ' ialemos ' is perhaps a
lament for sickness, and not for death. The confusion
is obvious. The collectors in part made divisions of
their own ; much more they utilised the local names
for local varieties of song which were not intended to
have any reference to one another. If an 'ialemos'
really differed from a ' threnos,' and each from an
* epikedeion,' it was only that they were all local names,
and the style of dirge-singing happened to vary in the
different localities.
The dithyramb proper was a song and dance to
Dionysus, practised in the earliest times in Naxos,
Thasos, Bceotia, Attica ; the name looks as if it were
compounded of Ai,-, 'god,' and some form of triumphus,
6p[aiJil3o<i, 'rejoicing.' It was a wild and joyous song.
It first appears with strophic correspondence; afterwards
it loses this, and has no more metre than the rhapso-
dies of Walt Whitman. It was probably accompanied
with disguise of some sort ; the dancers represented the
VARIETIES OF CHOIR-SONG 99
daemonic followers of Bacchus, whom we find in such
hordes on the early Attic drinking-vessels. We call them
satyrs ; but a satyr is a goat-daemon, and these have the
ears and tail of a horse, like the centaurs. The difference
in sentiment is not great : the centaurs are all the wild
forces that crash and speed and make music in the Thessa-
lian forests ; the satyr is the Arcadian mountain-goat, the
personification of the wildness, the music and mystery,
of high mountains, the instincts that are at once above
and below reason : his special personification is Pan,
the Arcadian shepherd-god, who has nothing to do with
Dionysus. When we are told that Arion " invented,
taught, and named " the dithyramb in Corinth, it may
mean that he first joined the old Dionysus-song with the
Pan-idea ; that he disguised his choir as satyrs. Corinth,
the junction of Arcadia and the sea-world, would be the
natural place for such a transition to take place. Thus
the dithyramb was a goat-song, a ' tragoidia ' ; and it
is from this, Aristotle tells us, that tragedy arose. It
is remarkable that the dithyramb, after giving birth
to tragedy, lived along with it and survived it. In
Aristotle's time tragedy was practically dead, while its
daughter, the new comedy, and its mother the Attic
dithyramb, were still flourishing.
THE EARLY MASTERS
Alcman
The name Alcman is the Doric for Alcmaeon, and the
bearer of it was a Laconian from Messoa {circa 615 B.C.).
But Athenian imagination could never assimilate the idea
loo LITERATURE OE ANCIENT GREECE
of a Spartan being a poet. In the case of Tyrtaeus they
made the poet an Athenian ; in that of Alcman, some
chance words in one of his poems suggested that he or
his ancestors came from Lydia. Hence a romance — he
was a Lydian, made a slave of war by the wild Kimme-
rians, and sold across seas to Sparta, where his beauti-
ful songs procured hini his freedom. Alcman is very
near the Lesbians ; he speaks freely in his own person,
using the choir merely as an instrument ; the personal
ring of his love-passages made Archytas (4th cent. B.C.)
count him the inventor of love-poetry ; he writes in a
fresh country dialect, as Sappho does, with little literary
varnish ; his personal enthusiasm for the national broth
of Sparta is like that of Carlyle for porridge. His metres
are clear and simple ; and the fragment imitated by
Tennyson in In Menioriain shows what his poetry can
be : " No more, oh, wild sweet throats, voices of love, will
viy limbs bear vie; ivould, zuould I were a ceryl-bird, that
flies on the flower of the wave ajuid the halcyons, tvith never
a care in his heart, the sea-purple bird of the spring! "
His longest fragment is on an Egyptian papyrus,
found by Mariette in 1855, and containing part of a
beautiful ' Parthenion,' or choir-song for girls. It is a
dramatic part-song. When we hear first that Agido
among the rest of the chorus is like " a race-horse among
cows" and afterwards that " the hair of my cousin Agesi-
chora gleams like pure gold," this does not mean that the
' boorish ' poet is expressing his own intemperate and
vacillating admirations — would the 'cows' of the choir
ever have consented to sing such lines ? — it is only that
the two divisions of the chorus are paying each other
compliments. This poem, unlike those of the Lesbians,
has a strophic arrangement, and is noteworthy as showing
ALCMAN : ARION loi
a clear tendency towards rhyme. There are similar
traces of intentional rhyme in Homer and yEschylus ; ^
whereas the orators and Sophocles, amid all their care
for euphony in other respects, admit tiresome rhyming
jangles with a freedom which can only be the result of
unsensitiveness to that particular relation of sounds.
Arion
ArioN of Methymna, in Lesbos, is famous in legend as
the inventor of the dithyramb, and for his miraculous
preservation at sea : some pirates forced him to ' walk the
plank' ; but they had allowed him to make music once
before he died, and when he sprang overboard, the dol-
phins who had gathered to listen, carried him on their
backs to Mount Taenarum. It is an old saga-motive,
applied to Phalanthos, son of Poseidon, in Tarentum, to
Enalos at Lesbos, and to the sea-spirits Palaemon,
Melikertes, Glaucus, at other places. Arion's own works
disappeared early ; Aristophanes of Byzantium could not
find any (2nd cent. B.C.), though an interesting piece of
fourth-century dithyramb in which the singer represents
Arion, has been handed down to us as his through a
mistake of ^Elian.
StSsichorus
The greatest figure in early choric poetry is that of
TisiAS, surnamed STfisiCHORUS(' Choir-setter') of Himera.
The man was a West-Locrian from Matauros, but be-
came a citizen of Himera in the long struggles against
Phalaris of brazen-bull celebrity. The old fable of the
1 Sept. 778 ff., 785 ff.
102 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
horse making itself a slave to man in order to be
revenged on the stag, was one of his warnings against
the tyrant. When Phalaris triumphed, Stesichorus re-
tired to Catana ; where his octagonal grave outside the
gate became in Roman times one of the sights of Sicily.
Apart from such possible fragments of good tradition as
may survive in the notorious forgeries called the Letters
of Phalaris, we possess only one personal fact about his
life. He was attacked with a disease of the eyes ; and
the thought preyed upon his mind that this was the
divine wrath of Helen, of whom he had spoken in the
usual way in some poem — perhaps the Helen* or the
Sack of I lion. "^ His pangs of conscience were intensified
by historical difBculties. It was incredible that all Troy
should have let itself be destroyed merely to humour
Paris. If the Trojans would not give up Helen, it must
have been that they never had her. Tisias burst into a
recantation or ' Palinodia,' which remained famous :
" That tale was never true I Thy foot never stepped on the
benched galley, 7ior crossed to the towers of Troy." We
cannot be sure what his own version was ; it cannot well
have been that of Herodotus and Euripides, which makes
Helen elope to Egypt, though not to Troy. But, at any
rate, he satisfied Helen, and recovered his sight. A very
similar story is told of the Icelandic Skald Thormod.
The service that Stesichorus did to Greek literature is
threefold : he introduced the epic saga into the West ; he
invented the stately narrative style of lyric ; he vivified and
remodelled, with the same mixture of boldness and simple
faith as the Helen story, most of the great canonical
legends. He is called "the lyric Homer," and described
as " bearing the weight of the epos on his lyre." ^
^ Quint. X. I.
STESICHORUS OF HIMERA 103
The metres specially named ' Stesichorean ' — though
others had used them before Stesichorus — show this
half-epic character. They are made up of halves of the
epic hexameter, interspersed with short variations —
epitrites, anapaests, or mere syncopae — just enough to
break the dactylic swing, to make the verse lyrical. His
diction suits these long stately lines ; it is not passionate,
not very songful, but easily followed, and suitable for
narrative. This helps to explain why so important a
writer has left so few fragments. He was not difficult
enough for the grammarian ; he was not line by line
exquisite enough for the later lover of letters. The
ancient critics, amid all their praises of Stesichorus,
complain that he is long ; the Oresteia * alone took two
books, and doubtless the Sack of I lion * was equal to it.
His whole works in Alexandrian times filled twenty-six
books. He had the fulness of an epic writer, not the
vivid splendour that Pindar had taught Greece to ex-
pect in a lyric. Yet he gained an extraordinary position.^
Simonides, who would not over-estimate one whom he
hoped to rival, couples him with Homer — " So sang to the
nations Homer and Stesichorus." In Athens of the fifth
century he was universally known. Socrates praised him.
Aristophanes ridiculed him. " Not to know three hnes
of Stesichorus " was a proverbial description of illiteracy .^
There was scarcely a poet then living who was not in^
fluenced by Stesichorus ; scarcely a painter or potter
who did not, consciously or unconsciously, represent his
version of the great sagas. In tracing the historical
1 The coins of Htmera bearing the figure of Stesichorus are later than
241 B.C., when he had become a legend. Cf. also Cic. Verr. ii. 35.
- No reference, as used to be thought, to the strophe, antistrophe, epode
of choric music.
104 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE
development of any myth, research almost always finds
in Stcsichorus the main bridge between the earliest re-
mains of the story and the form it has in tragedy or in
the late epos. In the Agamemnon legend, for instance,
the concentration of the interest upon Clytaemnestra,
which makes the story a true tragedy instead of an