Handbook of Universal Literature, From the Best and Latest Authorities

by Anne C. Lynch Botta

3. THE CYCLIC POETS AND THE HOMERIC HYMNS.—The poems of Homer, as they became the foundation of all Grecian literature, are likewise the central point of the epic poetry of Greece. All that is most excellent in this line originated from them, and was connected with them in the way of completion or continuation. After the time of Homer, a class of poets arose who, from their constant endeavor to connect their poems with those of this master, so that they might form a great cycle, were called the Cyclic Poets. They were probably Homeric rhapsodists by profession, to whom the constant recitation of the ancient Homeric poems would naturally suggest the idea of continuing them by essays of their own. The poems known as Homeric hymns formed an essential part of the epic style. They were hymns to the gods, bearing an epic character, and were called proemia, or preludes, and served the rhapsodists either as introductory strains for their recitation, or as a transition from the festivals of the gods to the competition of the singers of heroic poetry.

4. POEMS OF HESIOD.—Nothing certain can be affirmed respecting the date of Hesiod; a Boeotian by birth, he is considered by some ancient authorities as contemporary with Homer, while others suppose him to have flourished two or three generations later. The poetry of Hesiod is a faithful transcript of the whole condition of Boeotian life. It has nothing of that youthful and inexhaustible fancy of Homer which lights up the sublime images of a heroic age and moulds them into forms of surpassing beauty. The poetry of Hesiod appears struggling to emerge out of the narrow bounds of common life, which he strives to ennoble and to render more endurable. It is purely didactic, and its object is to disseminate knowledge, by which life may be improved, or to diffuse certain religious notions as to the influence of a superior destiny. His poem entitled "Works and Days" is so entirely occupied with the events of common life, that the author would not seem to have been a poet by profession, but some Boeotian husbandman whose mind had been moved by circumstances to give a poetical tone to the course of his thoughts and feelings. The unjust claim of Perses, the brother of Hesiod, to the small portion of their father's land which had been allotted to him, called forth this poem, in which he seeks to improve the character and habits of Perses, to deter him from acquiring riches by litigation, and to incite him to a life of labor, as the only source of permanent prosperity. He points out the succession in which his labors must follow if he determines to lead a life of industry, and gives wise rules of economy for the management of a family; and to illustrate and enforce the principal idea, he ingeniously combines with his precepts mythical narratives, fables, and descriptions. The "Theogony" of Hesiod is a production of the highest importance, as it contains the religious faith of Greece. It was through it that Greece first obtained a religious code, which, although without external sanction or priestly guardians and interpreters, must have produced the greatest influence on the religious condition of the Greeks.

5. ELEGY AND EPIGRAM.—Until the beginning of the seventh century B.C., the epic was the only kind of poetry cultivated in Greece, with the exception of the early songs and hymns, and the hexameter the only metre used by the poets. This exclusive prevalence of epic poetry was doubtless connected with the political state of the country. The ordinary subjects of these poems must have been highly acceptable to the princes who derived their race from the heroes, as was the case with all the royal families of early times. The republican movements, which deprived these families of their privileges, were favorable to the stronger development of each man's individuality, and the poet, who in the most perfect form of the epos was completely lost in his subject, now came before the people as a man with thoughts and objects of his own, and gave free vent to the emotions of his soul in elegiac and iambic strains. The word elegeion means nothing more than the combination of a hexameter and a pentameter, making together a distich, and an elegy is a poem of such verses. It was usually sung at the Symposia or literary festivals of the Greeks; in most cases its main subject was political; it afterwards assumed a plaintive or amatory tone. The elegy is the first regularly cultivated branch of Greek poetry, in which the flute alone and neither the cithara nor lyre was employed. It was not necessary that lamentations should form the subject of it, but emotion was essential, and excited by events or circumstances of the time or place the poet poured forth his heart in the unreserved expression of his fears and hopes.

Tyrtaeus (fl. 694 B.C.), who went from Athens to Sparta, composed the most celebrated of his elegies on the occasion of the Messenian war, and when the Spartans were on a campaign, it was their custom after the evening meal, when the paean had been sung in honor of the gods, to recite these poems. From this time we find a union between the elegiac and iambic poetry; the same poet, who employs the elegy to express his joyous and melancholy emotions, has recourse to the iambus when his cool sense prompts him to censure the follies of mankind. The relation between these two metres is observable in Archilochus (fl. 688 B.C.) and Simonides (fl. 664 B.C.). The elegies of Archilochus, of which many fragments are extant (while of Simonides we only know that he composed elegies), had nothing of that spirit of which his iambics were full, but they contain the frank expression of a mind powerfully affected by outward circumstances. With the Spartans, wine and the pleasures of the feast became the subject of the elegy, and it was also recited at the solemnities held in honor of all who had fallen for their country. The elegies of Solon (592-559 B.C.) were pure expressions of his political feelings. Simonides of Scios, the renowned lyric poet, the contemporary of Pindar and Aeschylus, was one of the great masters of elegiac song.

The epigram was originally an inscription on a tombstone, or a votive offering in a temple, or on any other thing which required explanation. The unexpected turn of thought and pointedness of expression, which the moderns consider the essence of this species of composition, were not required in the ancient Greek epigram, where nothing was wanted but that the entire thought should be conveyed within the limit of a few distichs, and thus, in the hands of the early poets, the epigram was remarkable for the conciseness and expressiveness of its language and differed in this respect from the elegy, in which full expression was given to the feelings of the poet.

It was Simonides who first gave to the epigram all the perfection of which it was capable, and he was frequently employed by the states which fought against the Persians to adorn with inscriptions the tombs of their fallen warriors. The most celebrated of these is the inimitable inscription on the Spartans who died at Thermopylae: "Foreigner, tell the Lacedaemonians that we are lying here in obedience to their laws." On the Rhodian lyric poet, Timocreon, an opponent of Simonides in his art, he wrote the following in the form of an epitaph: "Having eaten much and drank much and said much evil of other men, here I lie, Timocreon the Rhodian."

6. IAMBIC POETRY, THE FABLE AND PARODY.—The kind of poetry known by the ancients as Iambic was created among the Athenians by Archilochus at the same time as the elegy. It arose at a period when the Greeks, accustomed only to the calm, unimpassioned tone of the epos, had but just found a temperate expression of lively emotion in the elegy. It was a light, tripping measure, sometimes loosely constructed, or purposely halting and broken, well adapted to vituperation, unrestrained by any regard to morality and decency. At the public tables of Sparta keen and pointed raillery was permitted, and some of the most venerable and sacred of their religious rites afforded occasion for their unsparing and audacious jests. This raillery was so ancient and inveterate a custom, that it had given rise to a peculiar word, which originally denoted nothing but the jests and banter used at these festivals, namely, Iambus. All the wanton extravagance which was elsewhere repressed by law or custom, here, under the protection of religion, burst forth with boundless license, and these scurrilous effusions were at length reduced by Archilochus into the systematic form of iambic metre.

Akin to the iambic are two sorts of poetry, the fable and the parody, which, though differing widely from each other, have both their source in the turn for the delineation of the ludicrous, and both stand in close historical relation to the iambic. The fable in Greece originated in an intentional travesty of human affairs. It is probable that the taste for fables of beasts and numerous similar inventions found its way from the East, since this sort of symbolical narrative is more in accordance with the Oriental than with the Greek character. Aesop (fl. 572 B.C.) was very far from being regarded by the Greeks as one of their poets, and still less as a writer. They considered him merely as an ingenious fabulist, to whom, at a later period, nearly all fables, that were invented or derived from any other source, were attributed. He was a slave, whose wit and pleasantry procured him his freedom, and who finally perished in Delphi, where the people, exasperated by his sarcastic fables, put him to death on a charge of robbing the temple. No metrical versions of these fables are known to have existed in early times.

The word "parody" means an adoption of the form of some celebrated poem with such changes as to produce a totally different effect, and generally to substitute mean and ridiculous for elevated and poetical sentiments. "The Battle of the Frogs and Mice," attributed to Homer, but bearing evident traces of a later age, belongs to this species of poetry.

7. GREEK MUSIC AND LYRIC POETRY.—It was not until the minds of the Greeks had been elevated by the productions of the epic muse, that the genius of original poets broke loose from the dominion of the epic style, and invented new forms for expressing the emotions of a mind profoundly agitated by passing events; with few innovations in the elegy, but with greater boldness in the iambic metre. In these two forms, Greek poetry entered the domain of real life. The elegy and iambus contain the germ of the lyric style, though they do not themselves come under that head. The Greek lyric poetry was characterized by the expression of deeper and more impassioned feeling, and a more impetuous tone than the elegy and iambus, and at the same time the effect was heightened by appropriate vocal and instrumental music, and often by the figures of the dance. In this union of the sister arts, poetry was indeed predominant, yet music, in its turn, exercised a reciprocal influence on poetry, so that as it became more cultivated, the choice of the musical measure decided the tone of the whole poem.