FOOTNOTES:
[49] This seems to have been recognized by the ancients, as is proved by the lines quoted from Hermesianax in Athenæus, xiii. 597, where the epithet μαλαχός, assigned to his pentameter, is meant to be emphatic. Mimnermus gave it a luxurious and tender quality.
[50] Without attempting to discuss the vexed question whether Tyrtæus was a native Spartan, or, according to the ancient tale, an Athenian naturalized in Sparta, his self-identification with the people he inspired justifies the phrase that I have used above.
[51] The sentiment of these last lines is not only ethically spirited, but it is also singularly, exquisitely Greek. The æsthetic tact of the Greek race felt the plastic charm of a youth's form dead upon the battle-field. Like a statue marbled by the frost of death he lies, the perfection of life-moulded clay; and his red wounds are the lips of everlasting praise. Not so the elder man. Nakedness and mutilation bring no honor to him; he has no loveliness of shape to be revealed and heightened by the injuries of war; for him the flowing beard and the robes of reverend eld are a majestic covering, to be withdrawn by no hand seeking to unveil secluded beauties. His lot is cast no longer in those fields, intense and passionate of art and love, where death, cropping the bloom unset, confers a crown of immortality. Cf. Iliad, xxii. 71. An echo of this Greek feeling for the beautiful young dead may be traced in David's picture of the drummer-boy at Avignon, in Walt Whitman, and in Lord Albemarle's "Recollections of Waterloo."
[52] The birthplace of Mimnermus is not very certain. Fragment 9 in Bergk's Collection would seem to justify the opinion that he was a native of Smyrna colonized from Colophon.
[53] Notice particularly the couplets of Theognis beginning ὤμοι ἐγὼν ἥβης and ἄφρονες ἄνθρωποι, Bergk, vol. ii. pp. 420, 550.
[54] Fragment 9 in Bergk's Collection might seem to express a manlier spirit, if we could suppose that it referred to personal exploits of the poet. It forms, however, part of a description of the early colonization of Smyrna from Pylos; when Mimnermus alludes to martial deeds, he does so with a tone of regret, as one who has no share in them, and lives his own life in political stagnation.
[55] Miscellanies, by the late John Addington Symonds, M.D. (Macmillan & Co., 1871), p. 410.
[56] Strabo quotes "the Nanno" as Athenæus quotes "the Leontion" of Hermesianax, another Colophonian amourist.
[57] Epistles, bk. i. 6. Translated thus by Conington: "If, as Mimnermus tells you, life is flat with naught to love, devote yourself to that."
[58] The well-known passage in the Iliad (xxiv. 527) which describes the two casks at the threshold of the house of Zeus contains the germ of this belief. But after Homer there arose a darker sense of the jealousy of the gods, accompanied in speculative minds by a tendency to call the principles of the divine rule in question.
[59] This subject will be resumed in the introduction to my chapter on Euripides, where I attempt to show how the Herodotean notion of divine jealousy was moralized at the time of the Persian war into the idea of Nemesis.
[60] See the passage quoted from Philemon by Athenæus, xiii. 569, where the institution of public lupanaria is ascribed to Solon.
[61] We may compare with this fragment a passage preserved from the Autolycus of Euripides, translated by me below in the chapter on the Fragments of Æschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides.
[62] very ingenious attempt was made by Mr. Hookham Frere to reconstruct the life of Theognis from his elegies. It would be too much to assert that his conjectures are always successful. Indeed, he often introduces foreign matter and modern sentiment, while he neglects the peculiarly Greek relations of the poet to his friend. Those who are curious about such works of hypercriticism would do well to study his Theognis Restitutus. (Frere's Works, vol. ii.) In doing so, they must, however, bear in mind, as already observed above, that a great many of the couplets and short poems ascribed to Theognis by the later Greeks were not really his own. Theognis, like Hesiod, Solon, and Phocylides, was credited with more proverbial wisdom than he can be held responsible for. Contradictory utterances are therefore not unfrequent in his elegies, and this fact renders a trustworthy restoration of his biography and body of opinion almost impossible.
[63] "Be stout, O heart of mine: ere now thou hast endured even more grimly grief than this."
[64] Miscellanies, by the late John Addington Symonds, M.D., p. 411.
CHAPTER IX.
THE SATIRISTS.
Invention of the Iambic Metre.—Archilochus.—His Parentage and Life.—His Fame among the Ancients.—Ancient and Modern Modes of Judging Artists.—The Originality of Archilochus as a Poet.—Simonides of Amorgos.—His Satire on Women.—The Ionian Contempt for Women.—Hipponax.—Limping Iambics.—Differences between the Satire of the Greeks and Romans.
The Greeks displayed their æsthetic instinct in nothing more remarkably than in their exact adaptation of the forms of art to the nature of the subjects which they undertook to treat. The hexameter had sufficed for the needs of the epic. The elegiac had fulfilled the requirements of pathetic or contemplative meditation. But with the development of the national genius a separate vehicle for satire was demanded. Archilochus of Paros created a new style, and presented in the iambic metre a new instrument to the poets of his race. The circumstances of the birth and parentage of Archilochus are significant. He was the son of Telesicles, a noble Ionian, and of Enipo, a slave-woman. Thus from the very first there were inequalities in his circumstances which may have sufficed to sour his temper. His birth, which may be fixed about 729 B.C., was predicted, according to old tradition, by the oracle at Delphi. The same oracle busied itself at a later period with his death, by cursing the Naxian soldier Calondas, who had killed him in battle, because he had "slain the servant of the Muses." As the fragments we possess of Archilochus render it difficult to understand the very high estimation in which he was held by the Greeks, and which these stories indicate, it may be well to preface this account of him with some quotations from the ancient critics. Longinus,[65] to begin with, explains the incongruities of his poetry by saying that he "dragged disorderly elements into his verse under the impulse of divine inspiration." Plato[66] calls him ὁ σοφώτατος Ἀρχίλοχος, "the prince of sages," which, in the mouth of a philosopher, is the highest panegyric. The Alexandrian critic Aristophanes, when asked which of the poems of Archilochus he liked best, answered with laconic brevity, "the longest." Hadrian,[67] in an epigram, says that the Muses turned the attention of Archilochus to mad iambics, in order that their darling Homer might not have so dangerous a rival in the field of the epic. All antiquity agreed in naming him second only to Homer: "Maximus poeta aut certe summo proximus," "a poet of the highest order, or surely next unto the greatest," says Valerius Maximus. The birthdays of Homer and Archilochus were celebrated on the same day; their busts were joined in Janus fashion—two faces and one head: Hippodromus the Sophist[68] called Homer the Voice, Archilochus the Breath or Soul, of the students of wisdom. The epithet κάλλιστος (most beautiful) was ascribed to him because of his perfect style, though the subjects of his poetry were anything but beautiful. Of this style Quintilian[69] says that it excelled in "powerful as well as short and quivering sentences," that it contained "the greatest possible amount of blood and sinews." The highest praise which Gorgias could pronounce on Plato when he published his dialogues upon the Sophists was to say that Athens had produced a new Archilochus. To multiply these panegyrics would be easy. But enough has been adduced to prove that the ancients looked on Archilochus as a worthy rival of Homer, as a poet supreme in his own department, as the creator of a new kingdom in poetry, as the sire of a long line of mighty artists.
What remains of the verse of Archilochus and what we know of his life are curiously at variance with this enthusiasm. Nothing proves the difference between ancient and modern views of art more strongly than the fact that all antiquity concurred in regarding as a divinely inspired benefactor of the human race a man who in the present day would have been hunted from society with execrations. This son of the slave-woman, born in an Ionian island, where license was more tolerated than in a Dorian state, devoted himself to satire, making his genius the instrument of private hate, and turning the golden gifts of the Muses to the service of his selfish spite. A greater contrast cannot be conceived than that which exists between Homer, the priest of gods and heroes, the poet of high actions and lofty passions, whose own life is buried in sacred and sublime mystery, and this satirist who saw the world with jaundiced eyes, prying about for subjects of his wrath and bitterness and scorn, whose themes were the passions of his own heart, the sordid misadventures of his personality. It was this contrast between Archilochus and Homer that gave the former a right in the estimation of the Greeks to take equal rank with the father of the epos. He, the greatest poet next in date to Homer, by virtue of a divine originality of genius, exercised his art in exactly the opposite field to that which Homer ruled as his demesne. Clearer sign than this of inspiration could not be demanded; and how should posterity withhold its gratitude from the poet who had unlocked a new chamber of the treasure-house of art? This was how the ancients reasoned, instead of measuring their poets, as the moderns try to do, by moral standards and conventional conceptions of propriety.
The facts in the life of Archilochus are briefly these. He was engaged to be married to Neobulé, daughter of Lycambes. Her father retracted his consent to the marriage, having possibly discovered that the temper of his proposed son-in-law was a mixture of gall, wormwood, vinegar, verjuice, vitriol, and nitric acid. Thereupon, as Horace says:
Archilochum proprio rabies armavit iambo.[70]
He made the iambic metre his own, and sharpened it into a terrible weapon of attack. Each verse he wrote was polished and pointed like an arrow-head. Each line was steeped in the poison of hideous charges against his sweetheart, her sisters, and her father. The set of poems which he produced, and, as it would appear, recited publicly at the festival of Demeter, were so charged with wit and fire that the country rang with them. The daughters of Lycambes, tradition avers, went straightway and hanged themselves—unable to endure the flight of fiery serpents that had fallen on them; for, to quote the words of Browning, Archilochus had the art of writing verse that "bit into the live man's flesh like parchment," that sent him wandering, branded and forever shamed, about his native streets and fields. After this murderous exhibition of his power, Archilochus left Paros.[71]
Away with Paros! her figs and fishy life!
He removed to Thasos, where the Parians founded a colony. But Thasos was worse than Paros:[72] "Like the backbone of an ass, it stood bristling with wild wood; for, in sooth, it is not a fair land, or pleasant, or delightful, like that which spreads by Siris's stream." It was here he threw his shield away in a battle with the Thracians, and gave Horace and Alcæus a precedent by writing a poem on his want of prowess. The remainder of his life was spent in wandering. He visited Sparta, where, however, he was not suffered to remain an hour. The Ephors judged rightly that this runaway soldier and foul-mouthed Ionian satirist might corrupt the Spartan youth, or sow dissension in the State. The publication of his works was forbidden in this the most conservative of all Greek states. Finally Archilochus returned to Paros, and was killed in battle by a native of Naxos. A more unhappy existence, wretched in itself and the cause of wretchedness to others, can scarcely be imagined, if the tale of the life of Archilochus be true. Dishonored by the inequality of his parentage, slighted in the matter of his marriage, discontented at home, restless and rejected abroad, he seems to have been formed by the facts of his biography for the creation of satire. And this is his greatest title to fame.
It is possible that the iambic metre existed before the date of Archilochus. An old myth connects it with the festivals of Demeter. Demeter, it is said, could not be made to laugh after her daughter's loss, until a nymph, Iambé, by her jests and sarcasms, raised a smile upon her lips. This legend proves that the Greeks referred the origin of the iambic to those jokes and gibes which were common in the feasts of Demeter, and from the licentious mirth of which the satiric element of comedy was developed. The iambic is nearest in cadence to the language of common life; it is, therefore, the fit vehicle for dialogue, and for all poetry that deals with common and domestic topics. Again, it is essentially rapid in movement: Horace speaks of celeres iambi (swift iambi); Hadrian calls them λυσσῶντες ἴαμβοι (raging iambi): this rapidity fitted them for sharp attack and swift satiric pungency. Admitting, then, that the metre may have been employed in early attempts at colloquial satire, Archilochus, perceiving its capacities, fashioned it to suit the purpose of his own consummate art. He was celebrated among the ancients for having perfected the metres belonging to what they called the διπλάσιον γένος, as distinguished from the ἴσον γένος—that is to say, the iambic and trochaic rhythms, in which either the arsis or the thesis has twice the time of the other. In a trochee the first syllable equals two of the same time as the second; in an iamb this order is reversed; whereas the dactyl and the spondee, on which the hexameter and elegiac metres are based, are feet each member of which has the same time, the two shorts of the dactyl being equivalent to the second long of the spondee. Archilochus, if not absolutely the inventor, was the creator of these two metres, the iambic and trochaic, as truly as Homer was the creator of the heroic measure. No proof of the power of his genius can be greater than the fact that, whatever changes may have been subsequently wrought in the iambic and trochaic metres, they remained substantially the same as those which Archilochus employed, whether afterwards adapted to satire, tragedy, or comedy. While speaking of Archilochus as a technical artist, it ought to be mentioned that he gave further proof of his originality by elaborating the metrical systems which the Greeks called Asynartêtes, or unconnected. These consisted of a mixture of dactylic and anapæstic with trochaic feet. The ithyphallic, which was marked by a succession of three trochees at the end of the line, was the most distinguished.
To translate Archilochus is almost impossible. His merit is the perfection of style, which will admit of no transplantation. His language is the language of common life, exquisitely chosen, and kept within the most exact limits, with a view to the production of a carefully studied effect. It is hopeless to render such fragments as we possess without making them seem coarse or prosy, the poet's supremacy having been achieved by his artistic handling of vernacular Greek. When we compare its pithy terseness with the flowing grandeur of the epic—a grandeur which had already become conventional in Greece, a fluency which poetasters abused—it is easy to understand that the racy epigrams of Archilochus, in which the subject was set forth with exquisite point and without circumlocution, must have been an acceptable novelty to his audience. Greek sculpture is not more pure in outline than the following fragment,[73] which sets before our eyes the figure of a girl embossed on marble or engraved in chalcedony:
ἔχουσα θαλλὸν μυρσίνης ἐτέρπετο
ῥοδῆς τε καλὸν ἄνθος, ἡ δέ οἱ κόμη
ὤμους κατεσκίαζε καὶ μετάφρενα.
Archilochus flourished between 714 and 676 B.C. The date of the next iambic poet, Simonides of Amorgos, is 660 B.C. It is noticeable that both of these satirists are Ionian. The relaxation of Ionian life and the freedom of Ionian manners, as concerned the artist and the public, rendered the development of satire in Ionia more natural than it could ever have been in a Dorian state. Simonides owes his celebrity to a poem upon women, a very ungallant production of 119 lines, which presents one of the most curious examples upon record of a perfectly smooth and yet crushing satire. The iambic lines flow quietly and swiftly off the poet's lips, in mild and polished phraseology, with none of the concentrated fury of Archilochus. Yet Simonides aims at no less than destroying the character of a whole sex. In a sort of gentle, well-mannered, lazy way he is successful, not so much by persuading us through examples, after the method of Juvenal, that his satire is justified, as by the imperturbable expression of a profound conviction. The interest of this poem is very great, as marking a departure from the personalities of Archilochus and an attempt to introduce generalities into the region of satiric delineation. In this respect it is in Greek literature almost unique, if we except Sicilian, Megarian, and Attic comedy, whereof this is not the place to speak. The rhetorical treatment of a problem of social ethics from the point of view of satire was, as we shall see hereafter, alien to Greek literature.
This is the plan of the poem. Simonides describes the nature of the different sorts of women by comparing them successively to a hog, a fox, a dog, mud, sea-water, an ass, a weasel, a mare, an ape, a bee. Thus there are ten kinds, and only one respectable or industrious. He rushes at once in medias res: "God made the mind of women in the beginning of different qualities: for one he fashioned of a bristly hog; in whose house everything tumbles about in disorder, bespattered with mud, and rolls upon the ground: she, dirty, with unwashed clothes, sits and grows fat in a dung-heap." The woman like mud is thus hit off: "This woman is ignorant of everything both good and bad; her only accomplishment is eating; cold though the winter be, she is too stupid to draw near the fire." Here is the woman who takes after the sea: "She has two minds; when she laughs and is glad, the stranger seeing her at home will give her praise—there is not a better woman than this on the earth, no, nor a fairer; but another day she is unbearable, not to be looked at or approached, but she is right mad. To friend and foe she is alike implacable and odious. Thus as the sea often is calm and innocent, a great delight to sailors in summer-time, and oftentimes again is frantic, tearing along with roaring billows; so is this woman in her temper." The woman who resembles a mare offers other disagreeable qualities. She is "delicate and long-haired, unfit for drudgery or toil: she would not touch the mill or lift the sieve or clean the house out! She bathes twice or thrice a day, and smears herself with myrrh; then she wears her hair combed out, long and wavy, decked with flowers. It follows that this woman is a rare sight to one's guests, but to her husband she's a curse, unless he be a tyrant who prides himself on such expensive luxuries." The ape-like wife is treated even worse. But at last we reach the bee: "The man who gets her is lucky; to her alone belongs no blame: his property thrives and increases under her; and loving with a loving helpmate she grows old, the mother of a fair and famous race. Such wives are the best and wisest Zeus grants to men." Yet even after this pretty picture Simonides winds up with a comprehensive condemnation of the female sex: "Zeus made this supreme evil—women: even though they seem to be of good, when one has got one, she becomes a plague."
The spirit of this invective is derived in a great measure from Hesiod, whose myth of Pandora marked his estimate of women, and whose precepts concerning the choice of a wife must have depressed the Bœotian bachelors with the certainty that nine women out of ten would prove a curse. This is precisely the proportion of bad to good that Simonides establishes. His tenth and virtuous wife is praised because she is industrious and quiet, and the mother of many children. We here get the primitive ideal of the helpmeet for man. Modern theorists would condemn it as the model of a slave. And it is certain that, as Greek civilization advanced, without a corresponding elevation of the conception of wifehood, the chivalrous sentiment of the Greeks sought other channels than that of sexual love, exalting a form of passionate friendship between men as the real source of heroic action and inspiring thought.[74] The outline traced by Simonides was filled in by subsequent satirists. Susarion, the comic poet, makes this grandiloquent proclamation: "Hear, O ye people! These are the words of Susarion of Tripodiscus, Philinus's son, of Megara: Woman is a curse!" Aristophanes in his plays the Lysistrata, the Thesmophoriazusæ, and the Ecclesiazusæ, gives to the Athenian women all the attributes of the hog, the ape, the clay, the sea, and the fox; in the Clouds he draws the picture of one who is like the old blood-mare; but he does not hint, even by way of parody, that there existed any bees. The Greeks never learned the art of making women their companions in the noblest sense. It must, however, be borne in mind that the Ionians were less civilized in this respect than the Dorians, who had a higher regard for the excellences of women, and allowed them greater liberty.[75] Simonides is expressing Ionian rather than Dorian sentiments, and at the same time may be reasonably supposed to be overstraining them for the sake of a burlesque effect.
Next in date to Simonides among the iambographers ranks Hipponax of Ephesus, who flourished about 540 B.C. He, too, was an Ionian. The satire which Archilochus had directed against private enemies was extended, as we have seen, by Simonides to a whole sex; and thus its purely selfish character had been considerably modified. But Hipponax restored it to its primitive function. He used the iambic as a weapon of personal attack; and as Archilochus had shot his arrows against Lycambes and his daughters, so Hipponax found a butt in Bupalus and Athenis, sculptors of Chios. These two artists had begun by ridiculing the poet, who was short and thin and ugly. They seem to have made caricatures of him, piquing themselves, no doubt, upon the durability of the marble in which they worked. But they found more than their match in Hipponax, whose biting verses are said to have driven Bupalus to hang himself. Whether this is a mere echo of the tale of Lycambes remains doubtful; but, at any rate, the statues of the sculptor have perished, while the poet's iambics exist in sufficient force to justify his reputation among the ancients for having been the most caustic, crabbed, and sour of satirists. They called him ὁ πικρός (the pungent), and in their epigrams made merry over his traditional bad temper. Leonidas of Tarentum, for instance, warns travellers not to touch his tomb, lest they should rouse the sleeping wasp; and Alcæus of Messene says that no ivy, vine, or rose should adorn his grave, but only thorns and thistles.
In order apparently to bring the metre still more within the sphere of prose and common speech, Hipponax ended his iambics with a spondee or a trochee instead of an iambus, doing thus the utmost violence to the rhythmical structure. These deformed and mutilated verses were called χωλίαμβοι or ἴαμβοι σκάζοντες (lame or limping iambics). They communicate a curious crustiness to the style. The choliambi are in poetry what the dwarf or cripple is in human nature. Here again, by their acceptance of this halting metre, the Greeks displayed their acute æsthetic sense of propriety, recognizing the harmony which subsists between crabbed verses and the distorted subjects with which they dealt—the vices and perversions of humanity—as well as their agreement with the snarling spirit of the satirist. Deformed verse was suited to deformed morality. Meanwhile it is but just to Hipponax to record that he appears to have been a sincere castigator of crime, extravagance, and folly. Without the sublime perfection and fervid energy of Archilochus, he does not seem to have shared the unamiable personal qualities of the greater poet. Two of his lines give a sufficient notion of his style:
δύ' ἡμέραι γυναικός εἰσιν ἥδισται,
ὅταν γαμῇ τις κἀκφέρῃ τεθνηκυῖαν.
A woman gives two days of happiness to man, in her bridal and her burial.
The satire which these three Ionians, Archilochus, Simonides, and Hipponax, inaugurated in Greece was continued by the Attic comic poets. Satire in the Roman and the modern sense of the term never flourished among the Greeks. The life of the Agora, the Ecclesia, and the Theatre was too complete and free to need the supplement of rhetorical invective intended either for reading or for recitation. Of satirical comments upon individuals and of pasquinades of every kind the Greeks had plenty. We hear, for example, that Alcæus exercised his poetical talent in satirizing Pittacus, and one of the most considerable fragments of Anacreon contains a very ludicrous caricature of Artemon, his rival for the affections of a certain yellow-haired Eurypyle. But their satire did not incline to the form which the earlier writers of iambics had invented. It found its true sphere in the Dorian comedy of Epicharmus and the Athenian comedy of Aristophanes, who combined the personalities of Archilochus and the generalities of Simonides in his own consummate work of dramatic art. Among the lost treasures of Greek literature we have to regret few things more than the plays of the Syracusan Epicharmus, from whom we might have learned directly what now we can only infer—that the Dorians, when uncontrolled by the severe taste of Sparta, indulged a humor for drollery and sarcasm, which, though rougher than that of the Ionians, must have had its own flavor of raciness and fun. Roman satire maintained a strictly moral intention; facit indignatio versus is the motto of Juvenal, while Horace holds the mirror of worldly philosophy to the follies and the vices of his age, and Persius applies the canons of Stoical ethics to the phenomena of society as he observed them. This is the lead which our modern satirists—the Regnier of France, the Dryden or the Pope of England, have followed. Greek literature furnishes no specimen of this species of composition. Wherever in the Comedies of Aristophanes, or the Dialogues of Lucian, or the Epigrams of the Anthology, we meet with satire, we find the simple motives of Archilochus and Simonides at work. Personal animosity gives a barb and a venom to the shaft; or the poet delineates with more or less of comic wit the social anomalies that have struck his fancy. Of serious invective and of moral preaching, the Greeks, in their satiric art at least, knew nothing. Plato himself is only accidentally a satirist in the sense of the term which we moderns have adopted from the Romans.