ordinary tale of blood - feud, is his ; Clytaemnestra's
dream of giving suck to a serpent is his ; the con-
science-mad Orestes is probably his ; so are many of
the details of the sack of Troy, among them, if the
tradition is right, the flight of ^neas to Italy.

This is enough to show that Stesichorus was a creative
genius of a very high order — though, of course, none of
these stories is absolutely his own invention. Confessed
fiction was not possible till long after Stesichorus. To
the men of his day all legend was true history ; if it was
not, what would be tiie good of talking about it ? The
originality lies, partly, in the boldness of faith with which
this antique spirit examines his myths, criticising and
freely altering details, but never suspecting for an in-
stant that the whole myth is an invention^ and that he
himself is inventing it. It is the same with Pindar.
Pindar cannot and will not believe that Tantalus offered
his son to the gods as food, and that Demeter ate part
of his shoulder. Therefore he argues, not that the
whole thing is a fable, nor yet that it is beyond our
knowledge ; agnosticism would never satisfy him : he
argues that Poseidon must have carried off Pelops to
heaven to be his cup-bearer, and that during his ab-
sence some 'envious neighbour' invented the cannibal-
story. This is just the spirit of the Palinodia,

But, apart from this, even where Stesichorus did not
alter his saga-material, he shows the originality of genius



ORIGINALITY OF STESICHORUS. !BYCUS 105

in enlarging the field of poetry. He was the first to feel
the essence of beauty in various legends which lived in
humble places : in the death of the cowherd Daphnis for
shame at having once been false to his love (that rich
motive for all pastoral poetry afterwards) ; in the story
of the fair Kalyke, who died neglected ; of the ill-starred
Rhadina, who loved her cousin better than the tyrant
of Corinth. This is a very great achievement. It is what
Euripides did for the world again a little later, when the
mind of Greece, freeing itself from the stiffer Attic
tradition, was ready to understand.



THE MIDDLE PERIOD

Ibycus

A

Ibycus of Rhegion, nearly two generations later than
Stesichorus, led a w-andering life in the same regions
of Greece, passing on to the courts of Polycrates and
Periander. Like Arion, he is best known to posterity
by a fabulous story — of his murder being avenged by
cranes, 'ibykes.' His songs for boy-choirs are specially
praised. He is said to have shown an '^olo-Ionic
spirit' in songs of Dorian language and music, and
the charming fragments full of roses and women's
attire and spring and strange birds,^ and " brigJit sleep-
less dawn awaking the nightingales" show well what
this means. It is curious that the works of Stesi-
chorus were sometimes attributed to him — for instanccj
the Gaines at Pelias's Funeral* Our remains of the
two have little in common except the metre.

1 Cf. No. 8.



io6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE



Sim6nides

On tlie day, it is said, that Tisias died, there was born
in Keos the next great international lyrist of Greece,
SiMONiDES (556-468 B.C.). A man of wide culture and
sympathies, as well as great poetic power, he was soon
famous outside the circle of Ionian islands. Old Xeno-
phanes, who lived in Italy, and died before Simonides
was thirty, had already time to denounce him as a
well-known man. He travelled widely — first, it is said,
to Western Greece, at the invitation of Stesichorus's
compatriots ; afterwards to the court of Hipparchus in
Athens; and, on his patron's assassination, to the princes
of Thessaly. At one time he crossed to Asia; during the
Persian War he was where he should have been — with
the patriots. He ended his life with ^schylus, Pindar,
Bacchylides, Epicharmus, and others, at the court of
Hiero of Syracuse. If he was celebrated at thirty, in
his old age he had an international position comparable
perhaps to that of Voltaire. He was essentially a6(f>o<;,
the wit, the poet, the friend of all the great ones of the
earth, and their equal by his sheer force of intellect.
His sayings were treasured, and his poems studied with
a verbal precision which suggests something like idolatry.
Rumour loved to tell of his strange escape from ship-
wreck, and from the fall of the palace roof at Crannon,
which killed most of Scopas's guests. He was certainly a
man of rich and many-sided character ; he was trusted by
several tyrants and the Athenian democracy at the same
time ; he praised Hipparchus, and admired Harmodius
and Aristogeiton ; in his old age he was summoned to
Sicily to reconcile the two most powerful princes in



SIMONIDES OF KEOS 107

Greece, Gelo and Hiero. The charges of avarice which
pursue his memory are probably due to his writing
poems a prix fixe- — not for vague, unspecified patronage,
hke the earher poets. The old fashion was more friendly
and romantic, but contained an element of servitude,
Pindar, who laments its fall, did not attempt to recur
to it ; and really Simonides's plan was the nearest ap-
proach then possible to our system of the independent
sale of brain-work to the public. Simonides, like the
earlier lyrists, dealt chiefly in occasional poetry — the
occasion being now a festival, now a new baby, now the
battle of Thermopylae — and he seems to have introduced
the ' Epinikos,' the serious artistic poem in honour of
victories at the games. Not that an ' Epinikos ' is really
a bare ode on a victory — on the victory, for instance, of
Prince Skopas's mules. Such an ode would have little
power of conferring immortality. It is a song in itself
beautiful and interesting, into which the poet is paid to
introduce a reference to the mules and their master.

Simonides wrote in many styles : we hear of Dithy-
rambs, Hyporchemata, Dirges — all these specially ad-
mired — Parthenia, Prosodia, Paeans, Encomia, Epigrams.
His religious poetry is not highly praised. If one could
use the word ' perfect ' of any work of art, it might
apply to some of Simonides's poems on the events of
the great war — the ode on Artemisium, the epitaph on
those who died at Therm.opylaj. They represent the
extreme of Greek ' sophrosyne ' — self-mastery, healthy-
mindedness — severe beauty, utterly free from exaggera-
tion or trick — plain speech, to be spoken in the presence
of simple and eternal things : " Stranger, bear word to the
Spartans that we lie here obedient to their charge!' He
is great, too, in the realm of human pity. The little



io8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

fragment on Danaii adrift in the chest justifies the ad-
miration of ancient critics for his 'unsurpassed pathos.'
On the other hand, he is essentially an Ionian and a man
of the world, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment.
He has no splendour, no passion, no religious depth.
The man who had these stood on the wrong side in his
country's life-struggle ; and Greece turned to Simonides,
not to Pindar, to make the record of its heroic dead.

TiMOCREON

The 'Home for Geniuses' which Hiero's court even-
tually became, must have been a far from peaceful
refuge. Pindar especially was born to misunderstand
and dislike Simonides ; and though jealousy is not one
of the vices laid to the latter's charge, he was a wit and
could be severe. When he was attacked by a low poet
from Rhodes, TiMOCREON, who is chiefly known by his
indecent song of delight at the condemnation of Themis-
tocles as a traitor — " Not Timocreon alone makes compacts
zvith the Medes ; I am not the only dock-tail ; there are other
foxes too !" Simonides answered by writing his epitaph :
" Here lies Timocreon of Rhodes, who ate much, drank much,
and said many evil things!' The poet's poetry is not
mentioned.

Bacchylides

Simonides's nephew, Bacchylides, lived also at Hiero's
court, and wrote under the influences both of his uncle
and of Pindar. He was imitated by Horace, and ad-
mired for his moral tone by the Emperor Julian — a large
share of ' immortality ' for one who is generally reckoned
a second-class poet. And it appears that more is in store



BACCHYLIDES 109

for him. The British Museum has recently acquired a
papyrus of the first century B.C., containing several epi-
nikian odes of Bacchylides intact, as well as some fresh
fragments. It would be an ungracious reception to a
new-comer so illustrious in himself, to wish that he had
been some one else — Alcaeus, for instance, or Sappho or
Simonides. But we may perhaps hope that the odes will
not all be about the Games, as Pindar's are. The head-
ings of three of them, 'Theseus,' ' lo,' and 'Idas,' seem
to suggest a more varied prospect; but similar titles
are sometimes found in MSS. of Pindar, and merely
serve to indicate the myths which the particular 'Epini-
koi' contain. The longest of the new odes is in honour
of Hiero, and celebrates the same victory as Pindar's
first Olympian — a poem, by the way, which has been
thought to contain an unkind reflection upon Bacchy-
lides. The style is said to be much simpler than Pindar's,
though it shows the ordinary lyric fondness for strange
compound words, such as fieyicrToFdvaaaa. The most
interesting of the fragments heretofore published is in
praise of Peace.



THE FINAL DEVELOPMENT

Pindar

Pindar, "by far the chief of all the lyrists," as Quin-
tilian calls him, was born thirty-four years after Simoni-
des, and survived him about twenty (522-448 B.C.). He
is the first Greek \yriter for whose biography we have
real documents. Not only are a great many of his extant
poems datable, but tradition, which loved him for his
grammatical difficulties as well as for his genius, has pre-
9



no LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

served ;i pretty ii^ood account of his outer circumstances.
He was born at the village of Kynoskephahic, in Boeotia ;
he was descended from the ^gid<x, a clan of conquering
invaders, probably 'Cadmean/ since the name 'Pindar'
is found in Ephesus and Thera. ' The country-bred Boeo-
tian boy showed early a genius for music. The lyre,
doubtless, he learned as a child : there was one
Skopelinus at home, an uncle of the poet, or perhaps
his step-father, who could teach him flute-playing. To
learn choir-training and systematic music he had to go
to Athens, to 'Athenocles and Apollodorus.' Tradition
insisted on knowing something about his relation to
the celebrities of the time. He was taught by Lasus of
Hermione ; beaten in competition by his country-woman
Corinna, though some extant lines of that poetess make
against the story : " I praise not the gracious Myrtis, not /,
for coining to contest with Pindar, a woman born ! " And
another anecdote only makes Corinna give him good
advice — " to sozv ivith the Jiand, not with the whole sack,"
when he was too profuse in his mythological ornaments.
The earliest poem we possess {Fyth. x.), written when
Pindar was twenty — or possibly twenty-four — was a
commission from the Aleuadae, the princes of Pharsalus,
in Thessaly. This looks as if his reputation was made
with astonishing rapidity. Soon afterwards we find him
writing for the great nobles of ^Egina, patrons after his
own heart, merchant princes of the highest Dorian
ancestry. Then begins a career of pan-Hellenic cele-
brity : he is the guest of the great families of Rhodes,
Tenedos, Corinth, Athens ; of the great kings, Alexander
of Macedon, Arkesilaus of Cyrene, Thero of Acragas,
and Hiero of Syracuse. It is as distinguished as that of
Simonides, though perhaps less sincerely international.



LIFE OF PINDAR in

Pindar in his heart liked to write for 'the real nobility,'
the descendants of ^acus and Heracles ; his Sicilian
kings are exceptions, but who could criticise a friendly
king's claim to gentility ? This ancient Dorian blood
is evidently at the root of Pindar's view of life ; even
the way he asserts his equality with his patrons shows
it. Simonides posed as the great man of letters. Pindar
sometimes boasts of his genius, but leaves the impression
of thinking more of his ancestry. In another thing he
is unlike Simonides. Pindar was the chosen vessel of
the priesthood in general, a votary of Rhea and Pan, and,
above all, of the Dorian Apollo. He expounded the re-
habilitation of traditional religion, which radiated from
Delphi. He himself had special privileges at Delphi
during his hfe, and his ghost afterwards was invited
yearly to dine with the god. The priests of Zeus Amnion
in the desert had a poem of his written in golden letters
on their shrine.

These facts explain, as far as it needs explanation, the
great flaw in Pindar's life. He lived through the Persian
War ; he saw the beginning of the great period of
Greek enlightenment and progress. In both crises he
stood, the unreasoning servant of sacerdotal tradition
and racial prejudice, on the side of Boeotia and Delphi.
One might have hoped that when Thebes joined the
Persian, this poet, the friend of statesmen and kings in
many countries, the student from Athens, would have
protested. On the contrary, though afterwards when
the war was won he could write Ncmean iv. and the
Dithyramb for Athens, in the crisis itself he made what
Polybius calls (iv. 31) "a most shameful and injurious
refusal " : he wrote a poem of which two large dreamy
lines are preserved, talking of peace and neutrality ! It



112 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

is typical of the man. Often in thinkinj^ over the best
pieces of Pindar — the majestic organ-playing, the grave
strong magic of language, the lightning-flashes of half-
revealed mystery — one wonders why this man is not
counted the greatest poet that ever lived, why he has
not done more, mattered more. The answer perhaps is
that he was a poet and nothing else. He thought in
music ; he loved to live among great and beautiful
images— Heracles, Achilles, Perseus, lason, the daughters
of Cadmus. When any part of his beloved saga repelled
his moral sensitiveness, he glided away from it, careful
not to express scepticism, careful also not to speak evil
of a god. He loved poetry and music, especially his
own. As a matter of fact, there was no poetry in the
world like his, and when other people sang they jarred
on him, he confesses, ' like crozvs!

He loved religion, and is on the emotional side a
great religious poet. The opening of Nemean vi. is
characteristic ; so is the end of his last dated work
{Pyth. viii.) : " Things of a day ! what are ive and what
not ? A dream about a shadow is man ; yet when some
god-given splendour falls, a glory of light comes over him
and his life is szveet. Oh, Blessed Mother ^gina, guard
thou this city in the ways of freedom, with Zeus and Prince
Abacus and Peleiis and good Telamon and Achilles!" — a
rich depth of emotion, and then a childlike litany of
traditional saints. His religious speculations are some-
times far from fortunate, as in Olympian i. ; sometimes
they lead to slight improvements. For instance, the
old myth said that the nymph Coronis, loved by Phoebus,
was secretly false to him ; but a raven saw her, and told
the god. Pindar corrects this: ^Uhe god's all- seeing
mind" did not need the help of the raven. It is quite



RELIGION AND IDEALS OF PINDAR 113

in the spirit of the Delphic movement in religion, the de-
fensive reformation from the inside. Pindar is a moralist :
parenthetical preaching is his favourite form of orna-
ment ; it comes in perfunctorily, like the verbal quibbles
and assonances in Shakespeare. But the essence of his
morality has not advanced much beyond Hesiod ; save
that where Hesiod tells his peasant to work and save,
Pindar exhorts his nobleman to seek for honour and
be generous. His ideal is derived straight from the
Dorian aristocratic tradition. You must start by being
well-born and brave and strong. You must then do
two things, work and spend : work with body and soul ;
spend time and money and force, in pursuit of dpeTa,
'goodness.' And what is 'goodness' ? The sum of
the qualities of the true Dorian man, descended from
the god- born, labouring, fearless, unwearied fighter
against the enemies of gods and men, Heracles. It is
not absolutely necessary to be rich — there were poor
Spartans ; nor good-looking — some of his prize boxers
were probably the reverse. But honour and renown
you must have. Eccentric commentators have even
translated apsTo, as ' success in games ' — which it im-
plied, much as the ideal of a mediaeval knight implied
success in the tourney.

Pindar is not false to this ideal. The strange air of
abject worldliness which he sometimes wears, comes
not because his idealism forsakes him, but because he
has no sense of fact. The thing he loved was real
heroism. But he could not see it out of its traditional
setting ; and when the setting was there, his own imagi-
nation sufficed to create the heroism. He was moved
by the holy splendour of Delphi and Olympia ; he liked
the sense of distinction and remoteness from the vulgar



114 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

which hung about the court of a great prince, and he
ideaHsed the merely powerful Hiero as easily as the
really gallant Chromios. Not that he is ever conscious
of identifying success with merit ; quite the reverse.
He is deeply impressed with the power of envy and
dishonest arts — the victory of the subtle Ionian Odysseus
over the true ^Eacid Aias. It was this principle perhaps
which helped him to comprehend why Simonides had
such a reputation, and why a mob of Athenian sailors,
with no physique and no landed property, should make
such a stir in the world.

It is a curious freak of history that has preserved us
only his ' Epinikoi ' — songs for winners in the sacred
games at Olympia, Pytho, Nemea, and the Isthmus. Of
all his seventeen books — "Hymns; Paeans; Dithyrambs,
2 ; Prosodia, 2 ; Parthenia, 3 ; Dance-songs, 2 ; Encomia ;
Dirges ; Epinikoi, 4 " — the four we possess are certainly
not the four we should have chosen. Yet there is in
the kind of song something that suits Pindar's genius.
For one thing, it does not really matter what he writes
about. Two of his sublimest poems are on mule-races.
If we are little interested by the fact that Xenophon of
Corinth won the Stadium and the Five Bouts at Olympia
in the fifth century B.C., neither are we much affected
by the drowning of young Edward King in the seven-
teenth A.D. Poems like Lycidas and Olympian xiii. are
independent of the facts that gave rise to them. And,
besides, one cannot help feeling in Pindar a genuine
fondness for horses and grooms and trainers. If a
horse from Kynoskephalae ever won a local race, the
boy Pindar and his fellow-villagers must have talked
over the points of that horse and the proceedings of
his trainer with real affection. And whether or no the



NATURE OF PINDAR'S GENIUS 115

poet was paid extra for the references to Melesias the
* professional,' and to the various uncles and grand-
fathers of his victors, he introduces them with a great-
semblance of spontaneous interest. It looks as if he
was one of those un-self-conscious natures who do not
much differentiate their emotions : he feels a thrill at
the sight of Hiero's full-dress banquet board, of a wrest-
ling bout, or of a horse-race, just as he does at the
thought of the labour and glory of Heracles ; and every
thrill makes him sing.

Pindar was really three years younger than ^schylus ;
yet he seems a generation older than Simonides. His
character and habits of thought are all archaic ; so is his
style. Like most other divisions of Greek literature, the
lyric had been working from obscure force to lucidity. It
had reached it in Simonides and Bacchylides. Pindar
throws us back to Alcman, almost. He is hard even to
read ; can any one have understood him, sung ? He tells
us how his sweet song will " sail off from Aigina in the big
ships and the little fisJiing-boats " as they separate home-
wards after the festival {Nem. v.). Yet one can scarcely
believe that the Dorian fishermen could catch at one
hearing much of so difficult a song. Perhaps it was only
the tune they took, and the news of the victory. He
was proud of his music ; and Aristoxenus, the best judge
we have, cannot praise it too highly. Even now, though
every wreck of the music is lost — the Messina musical
fragment (of Pyth. i.) being spurious — one feels that
the words need singing to make them intelligible. The
mere meaning and emotion of Pythian iv. or Olympian ii.
— to take two opposite types — compel the words into
a chant, varying between slow and fast, loud and
low. The clause-endings ring like music : iraXi'yKorov



ii6 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

Ba/xaadev {OlvDip. ii.) is much more than ^^ angry and
overborne!' The king of the Epeans, when ^^ into the
deep channel running deathzvards, he watched — 'iCpiaav kav
TTokiv — his own city sink " {Olymp. x. 38), remains in one's
mind by the echoing " iny own " of the last words ; so
Pelops praying ^' by the grey sea-surge — oio<i iv 6p(f)va,
alone in the darkness " — in Olymp. i. ; so that marvellous
trumpet-crash in Pyth. iv. {ant. 5) on the last great word
Tifjidv. Many lovers of Pindar agree that the things that
stay in one's mind, stay not as thoughts, but as music.

Few people care for Pindar now. He is hard in the
original — dialect, connection, state of mind, all are diffi-
cult to get into ; and readers are wearied by the strange
mixture of mules and the new moon and trainers and the
^acidae. In translations — despite the great skill of some
of them — he is perhaps more grotesquely naked than any
poet ; and that, as we saw above, for the usual reason,
that he is nothing but a poet. There is httle rhetoric, no
philosophy, little human interest; only that fine bloom —
what he calls awTO'i — which comes when the most sensi-
tive language meets the most exquisite thought, and
which " not even a god though he worked hard " could
keep unhurt in another tongue.

Pindar was little influenced either by the movements
of his own time or by previous writers. Stesichorus
and Homer have of course affected him. There are just
a few notes that seem echoed from ^schylus : the
eruption of ^tna is treated by both ; but Pindar seems
quite by himself in his splendid description {Pyth. i.).
It is possible that his great line Xvcre he Zeif? a(f)9tT0'i
TiTdva<;, is suggested by the Prometheus trilogy, of which
it is the great lesson — "Everlasting Zeus set free the
Titans."



V

THE BEGINNINGS OF PROSE

Inscriptions

If our earliest specimens of Greek prose are inscribed on
stone and bronze, that only means that these are durable
materials, and have outlived the contemporary wood and
wax and parchment. At the time of the treaty betvi^een
Elis and Heraea in the sixth century, there must have
been plenty of commercial and diplomatic correspond-
ence ; there must have been much writing as well as
talking to settle the exact agreement between Oianthe
and Chaleion about piracy, and to fix the mild penalty
of four drachmas for exercising that privilege in the
wrong place. But it looks as if the earliest prose was
in essence similar to these inscriptions — a record of
plain, accurate statements of public importance, which
could not be trusted to the play of a poet's imagination
or the exigencies of his metre. The temples especially
were full of such writings. There were notices about
impiety. At lalysus, for instance, the goddess Alectrona
announced a fine of 10,000 drachmae for the entrance into
her precinct of horses, mules, asses, and men in pig-skin
shoes. There were full public statements of accounts.
There w^ere records of the prayers which the god had

answered, engraved at the cost of the votary ; of the

117



ii8 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE

offences he had signally visited, engraved, presumably, by
the temple authorities. In the medical temples of Cos,
Rhodes, and Cnidus, there were, as early as the sixth
century B.C., full notes of interesting diseases, giving the
symptoms, the treatment, and the result. There were,
doubtless, records of prodigies and their expiations.
There were certainly lists of priests and priestesses,
sometimes expanding into a kind of chronicle.

These were public and subject to a certain check. But
there were also more esoteric books, not exposed to the
criticism of the vulgar. The ceremonial rules were
sometimes published and sometimes not ; the Exegetai
at Athens had secret records of omens and judgments on
points of law or conscience ; in Delphi and other centres,