so sings Theognis (977), and with even more of pathos he exclaims—
Ah me! my youth! alas for eld's dark day:
This comes apace, while that fleets fast away.
The same idea is repeated in many other elegies, always with the same sad cadence: "No man, as soon as the earth covers him, and he goes down to Erebus, the home of Persephone, takes any pleasure in the sound of the lyre, or the voice of the flute-player, or in the sweet gifts of Dionysus" (973-976). At another time he reckons up the ills of life: "When I am drinking I take no heed of soul-consuming poverty or of enemies who speak ill of me; but I lament delightful youth which is forsaking me, and wail for grim old age who cometh on apace" (1129-1132). Their tone reminds us of Mimnermus, who said the utmost when he cried—
Zeus to Tithonus gave a grievous ill—
Undying age, than death more horrible!
To multiply more elegies of this description would be useless. We may, however, allude to a poem of Simonides (Frag. 100, ed. Gaisford), which combines the sweetness of Mimnermus and the energy of Theognis: "Nothing human endures for aye. Well said the bard of Chios, that like the leaves so is the race of men: yet few who hear this keep it in their mind; for hope is strong within the breast of youth. When the flower of youth lasts, and the heart of a man is light, he nurses idle thoughts, hoping he never will grow old or die; nor does he think of sickness in good health. Fools are they who dream thus, nor know how short are the days of youth and life. But learn thou this, and live thy life out, cheering thy soul with good things." The tone of these elegies pervades a great many monuments of Greek sculpture. Standing before the Genius of Eternal Repose, or the so-called Genius of the Vatican, we are moved almost to tears by the dumb sadness with which their perfect beauty has been chastened. Like the shade of young Marcellus in Virgil, they seem to carry round them a cloud of gloom, impalpable, yet overshadowing their youth with warnings and anticipations of the tomb.
With Theognis the list of gnomic poets, strictly so called, may be said to close. Simonides, from whom I have adduced some passages in illustration of the elder elegiac writers, survived the bard of Megara, and attained a far greater reputation than he enjoyed, at the Syracusan and Athenian courts. How highly his maxims were valued by the moralists of the succeeding age is known by every reader of the Protagoras and Republic of Plato. But a more detailed analysis of his verses would be out of place, when we consider that his chief fame rests upon epitaphs, patriotic epigrams, and lyrical fragments—none of them strictly gnomic in their character.
To modern readers the philosophy of the poets whom we have considered will perhaps seem trite, their inspiration tame, their style pedestrian. But their contemporaries were far from arriving at this criticism. To obtain concise and abstract maxims upon the ethics of society, politics, and education was to them a new and inestimable privilege. In the gnomic poets the morality which had been merely implicit in Homer and Hesiod received separate treatment and distinct expression. The wisdom which had been gradually collecting for centuries in the Greek mind was tersely and lucidly condensed into a few pregnant sentences. These sentences formed the data for new syntheses and higher generalizations, the topics for enlarged investigation, the "middle axioms" between the scattered facts of life and the unity of philosophical system. We may regard the gnomic poets with interest, partly on account of the real, if rare, beauty of some of their fragments; partly on account of their historical and illustrative value; partly because all efforts of the human mind in its struggle for emancipation, and all stages in its development, are worthy of attentive study. To the sophists, to the orators, to Socrates and his friends, to the tragic writers, to educated men at large in Hellas, they were authorities on moral questions; and their maxims, which the progress of the centuries has rendered commonplace, appeared the sentences of weightiest wisdom, oracles almost, and precepts inspired by more than human prudence.