Leave not our sires to stem the unequal fight,
Whose limbs are nerved no more with buoyant might;
Nor, lagging backward, let the younger breast
Permit the man of age (a sight unblest)
To welter in the combat's foremost thrust,
His hoary head dishevell'd in the dust,
And venerable bosom bleeding bare.
But youth's fair form, though fallen, is ever fair,
And beautiful in death the boy appears,
The hero boy, that dies in blooming years:
In man's regret he lives, and woman's tears;
More sacred than in life, and lovelier far,
For having perished in the front of war.[51]
Strangely different are the elegies of Mimnermus, the poet of Colophon, who flourished towards the end of the seventh century B.C.[52] His name has passed into a proverb for luxurious verse, saddened by reflections on the fleeting joys of youth, and on the sure and steady progress of old age and death. Tyrtæus, though a native of Attica, wrote for Spartans at war with a strong nation; Mimnermus was born and lived among Ionian Greeks emasculated by barbarian control and by contact with the soft Lydians. It was of these Colophonians that Xenophanes, a native poet, said, "Instructed in vain luxury by the Lydians, they trailed their robes of purple through the streets, with haughty looks, proud of their flowing locks bedewed with curious essences and oils." For such a people the exquisitely soft and musical verses of Mimnermus, pervaded by a tone of lingering regret, were exactly suited. They breathe the air of sunny gardens and cool banquet-rooms, in which we picture to ourselves the poet lingering out a pensive life, endeavoring to crowd his hours with pleasures of all kinds, yet ever haunted and made fretful among his roses by the thought of wrinkles and death. "When your youth is gone," he says, "however beautiful you may have been, you lose the reverence of your children and the regard of your friends." "More hideous is old age than death. It reduces the handsome and the plain man to one level—cares attend it—the senses and the intellects get deadened—a man is forgotten and put out of the way." The Greek sentiment of hatred for old age is well expressed in one epithet which Mimnermus employs—ἄμορφον, formless. The Greeks detested the ugliness and loss of grace which declining years bring with them almost more than weakened powers or the approach of death. Nay, "when the flower of youth is past," says Mimnermus, "it is best to die at once." Men are like herbs, which flourish for a while in sunshine—then comes the winter of old age, with poverty or disease, or lack of children. His feeling for the charm of youth was intense; he expressed it in language that reminds us of the fervency of Sappho: "Down my flesh the sweat runs in rivers, and I tremble when I see the flower of my equals in age gladsome and beautiful."
This tender and regretful strain is repeated by Mimnermus with a monotonous, almost pathetic persistency, as if the one thought of inevitable age oppressed him like a nightmare day and night. His delight in the goodliness of youth and manhood is so acute, and his enjoyment of existence is so exquisite, that he shrinks with loathing from the doom imposed on all things mortal to decline and wither. "May I complete my life without disease or cares, and may death strike me at my sixtieth year!" Such is the prayer he utters, feeling, probably, that up to sixty the senses may still afford him some enjoyment, and that, after they are blunted, there is nothing left for man worth living for. In all this, Mimnermus was true to one type of the Greek character. I shall have occasion farther on to revert to this subject, and to dwell again upon the fascination which the flower of youth possessed for the Greeks, and the horror with which the ugliness of age inspired them.[53] That some escaped this kind of despair, which to us appears unmanly, may be gathered from the beautiful discourse upon old age with which the Republic of Plato opens. Mimnermus, however, belonged to a class of men different from Cephalus: nowhere in the whole range of literature can be found a more perfect specimen of unmitigated ennui.[54] In his verse we trace the prostrate tone of the Oriental, combined with Greek delicacy of intellect and artistic expression. The following passage may be cited as at once illustrative of his peculiar lamentation, and also of his poetical merits:
What's life or pleasure wanting Aphrodite?
When to the gold-haired goddess cold am I,
When love and love's soft gifts no more delight me,
Nor stolen dalliance, then I fain would die!
Ah! fair and lovely bloom the flowers of youth;
On men and maids they beautifully smile:
But soon comes doleful eld, who, void of ruth,
Indifferently afflicts the fair and vile:
Then cares wear out the heart; old eyes forlorn
Scarce reck the very sunshine to behold—
Unloved by youths, of every maid the scorn—
So hard a lot God lays upon the old.[55]
We are not surprised to hear that the fragments of Mimnermus belonged to a series of elegies addressed to a flute-player called Nanno.[56] They are worthy of such a subject. Nanno, according to one account, did not return the passion of the poet.
In Mimnermus, however luxurious he may have been, we yet observe a vein of meditation upon life and destiny which prepares us for the more distinctly gnomic poets. Considered in the light of Greek philosophy, Mimnermus anticipates the ethical teaching of the Hedonists and Epicureans. In other words, he represents a genuine view of life adopted by the Greeks. Horace refers to him as an authority in these well-known lines:
Si, Mimnermus uti censet, sine amore jocisque
Nil est jucundum, vivas in amore jocisque;[57]
on which the scholiast observed that the elegiac poet "agreed with the sect of the Epicureans."
Next to Mimnermus in point of time is Solon. Perhaps the verses of this great man were among his least important productions. Yet their value, in illustrating the history of Athens, would have been inestimable, had they been preserved to us in a more perfect state. "There is hardly anything," says Grote, "more to be deplored, amidst the lost treasures of the Grecian mind, than the poems of Solon; for we see by the remaining fragments that they contained notices of the public and social phenomena before him, which he was compelled attentively to study, blended with the touching expression of his own personal feelings, in the post, alike honorable and difficult, to which the confidence of his countrymen had exalted him." The interest of Solon as a gnomic poet is derived chiefly from the fact that he was reckoned one of the seven wise men of Greece, that he was one of the two most distinguished Nomothetæ of Hellas, that he is said to have conversed familiarly with the great Lydian monarch, and that he endeavored at Athens to resist the growing tyranny of Pisistratus. Thus Solon bore a prominent part in all the most important affairs of the period to which the gnomic poetry belongs. Its politics, diplomacy, and social theories, its constitutional systems and philosophy, were perfectly familiar to him, and received a strong impress from his vigorous mind. It is thought that his poems belong to an early period of his life; yet they embody the same sentiments as those which Herodotus refers to his old age, and express in the looser form of elegiac verse the gist of apothegms ascribed to him as one of the seven sages.