[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by the injuries of war; for him the flowing beard and the robes of reverend eld are a majestic covering, to be withdrawn by no hand seeking to unveil secluded beauties.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.