In the age of Greek decadence the honors of the prosodion were sometimes paid to men. Athenæus gives this lively description of the procession which greeted Demetrius Poliorketes: "When Demetrius returned from Leucadia and Corcyra to Athens, the Athenians received him not only with incense and garlands and libations, but they even sent out processional choruses, and greeted him with ithyphallic hymns and dances: stationed by his chariot-wheels, they sang and danced and chanted that he alone was a real god; the rest were sleeping, or were on a journey, or did not exist; they called him son of Poseidon and Aphrodite, eminent for beauty, universal in his goodness to mankind; then they prayed and besought and supplicated him like a god." The hymn which they sang may be read in Bergk, vol. iii. p. 1314. It is one of the most interesting relics of antiquity.[80]
For the sake of its rare and curious metre alternating the iambic and trochaic rhythms, I have faced the difficulties of translation, and have ventured on the following version:
See how the mightiest gods, and best-beloved
Towards our town are winging!
For lo, Demeter and Demetrius
This glad day is bringing!
She to perform her daughter's solemn rites;
Mystic pomps attend her:
He, joyous as a god should be, and blithe,
Comes with laughing splendor.
Show forth your triumph! Friends all, troop around!
Let him shine above you!
Be you the stars to circle him with love;
He's the sun to love you.
Hail, offspring of Poseidon, powerful god,
Child of Aphrodite!
The other gods keep far away from earth;
Have no ears, though mighty;
They are not, or they will not hear us wail:
Thee our eye beholdeth;
Not wood, not stone, but living, breathing, real,
Thee our prayer enfoldeth.
First give us peace! Give, dearest, for thou canst:
Thou art Lord and Master!
The Sphinx, who not on Thebes, but on all Greece
Swoops to gloat and pasture;
The Ætolian, he who sits upon his rock,
Like that old disaster;
He feeds upon our flesh and blood, and we
Can no longer labor;
For it was ever thus the Ætolian thief
Preyed upon his neighbor;
Him punish thou, or if not thou, then send
Œdipus to harm him,
Who'll cast this Sphinx down from his cliff of pride,
Or to stone will charm him.
A special kind of prosodia were the Parthenia, or processional hymns of maidens; such, for example, as the Athenian girls sang to Pallas while they climbed the staircase of the Parthenon. Aristophanes has presented us with a beautiful example of antiphonal Parthenia at the end of his Lysistrata, where choruses of Athenian and Spartan girls sing turn and turn about in rivalry. Alcman won his laurels at Sparta by the composition of this kind of hymn. A fragment (Bergk, p. 842) only remains to show what they were like: "No more, ye honey-voiced, sweet-singing maidens, can my limbs support me: oh, oh, that I were a cerylus, who skims the flower of the sea with halcyons, of a dauntless heart, the sea-blue bird of spring!" Such Parthenia, when addressed to Phœbus, were called Daphnephorica; for the maidens carried laurel-branches to his shrine. A more charming picture cannot be conceived than that which is presented to our fancy by these white-robed virgins, each with her rod of bay and crown of laurel-leaves, ascending the marble steps of the temple of the Dorian god. John Lyly, who had imbibed the spirit of Greek life, has written a hymn, "Sing to Apollo, god of day!" which might well have been used at such a festival.
The prosodia of which we have been speaking were addressed to all the gods. But there were other choric hymns with special names, consecrated to the service of particular deities. Of this sort was the pæan, sung to Phœbus in his double character of a victorious and a healing god. The pæan was both a song of war and of peace; it was the proper accompaniment of the battle and the feast. In like manner the hyporchem, which, as its name implies, was always accompanied by a dance, originally formed a portion of the cult of Phœbus. The chorus described in the Iliad, xviii. 590, and the glorious pageant of Olympus celebrated in the Hymn to Apollo, 186, were, technically speaking, hyporchems. As the pæan and the hyporchem were originally consecrated to Apollo, so the dithyramb and the phallic hymn belonged to Dionysus. The dithyramb never lost the tempestuous and enthusiastic character of Bacchic revelry; but in time it grew from being a wild celebration of the mystic sufferings of Bacchus into the sublime art of tragedy. Arion forms the point of this transition. He seems to have thrown a greater reality of passion and dramatic action into his choruses, which led to the introduction of dialogue, and so by degrees to tragedy proper. Meanwhile the dithyramb, as a tumultuous choric song, retained its individual existence. As Arion had devoted his genius to the cultivation of the tragic or cyclic chorus, Lasos, the master of Pindar, stamped his own style upon the dithyrambic ode as it continued to be used at festive meetings. Every town in Greece had its chorodidascalus, a functionary whom Aristophanes ridicules in the person of Kinesias in the Birds.[81] He is introduced warbling the wildest, windiest nonsense, and entreating to have a pair of wings given him that he may chase his airy ideas through the sky. The phallic hymn, from which in like manner comedy took its origin, was a mad outpouring of purely animal exultation. Here the wine-god was celebrated as the pleasure-loving, drunken, lascivious deity. Aristophanes, again, our truest source of information respecting all the details of Greek life, supplies us with an instance of one of these songs, and of the simple rites which accompanied its performance.[82] In the Frogs, also, the Master of Comedy has presented us with an elaborate series of Bacchic hymns.[83] Here the phallic and satyric element is combined with something of the grandeur of the dithyrambic ode; the curious mixture of sarcasm, obscenity, and splendid poetry offers a striking instance of Greek religious feeling, so incomprehensible to modern minds. It is greatly to be regretted that our information respecting the dithyramb and the phallic chorus has to be obtained from a dramatic poet rather than from any perfect specimens of these compositions. Bergk's Collection, full as it is, yields nothing but hints and fragments.[84]
Passing to the lyrics, which were connected with circumstances of human life, the first to be mentioned are epinikia, or odes sung in honor of victors at the games. Of these, in the splendid series of Pindar and in the fragments of Simonides, we have abundant examples. We are also able to trace their development from the simple exclamation of τήνελλα ὦ καλλίνικε,[85] the composition of which was ascribed to Archilochus, and which Pindar looked back upon with scornful triumph. Indeed, in his hands, to use the phrase of Wordsworth, "the thing became a trumpet, whence he blew soul-animating strains." The epinikian ode was the most costly and splendid flower in the victor's wreath. Pindar compares the praise which he pours forth for Diagoras the Rhodian to noblest wine foaming in the golden goblet, which a father gives to honor his son-in-law, the prime and jewel of his treasure-house.
The occasions on which such odes were sung were various—either when the victor was being crowned, or when he was returning to his native city, or by torchlight during the evening of the victorious day, or at a banquet after his reception in his home. On one of these occasions the poet would appear with his trained band of singers and musicians, and, taking his stand by the altar of the god to whom the victor offered a thanksgiving sacrifice, would guide the choric stream of song through strophe and antistrophe and epode, in sonorous labyrinths of eulogy and mythological allusion—prayer, praise, and admonition mingling with the fumes of intoxicating poetry. Of all these occasions the most striking must have been the commemoration of a victory in the temple of Zeus at Altis, near Olympia, by moonlight. The contest has taken place during the day; and the olive-wreath has been placed upon the head, say, of Myronides, from Thebes. Having rested from his labors, after the bath and the banquet, crowned with his victorious garland and with fillets bound about his hair, he stands surrounded by his friends. Zeus, in ivory and gold, looks down from his marble pedestal. Through the open roof shines a moon of the south, glancing aslant on statue and column and carved bass-relief; while below, the red glare of torches, paling its silver, flickers with fitful crimson on the glowing faces of young men. Then swells the choral hymn, with praise of Myronides and praise of Thebes, and stormy flights of fancy shooting beyond sun and stars. At its close follow libation, dedication, hands upraised in prayer to Zeus. Then the trampling of sandalled feet upon the marble floor, the procession with songs still sounding to the temple-gate, and on a sudden, lo! the full moon, the hills and plain and solemn night of stars. The band disperses, and the Comus succeeds to the thanksgiving.
As a contrast to the epinikia we may take the different kinds of threnoi, or funeral songs. The most primitive was called epikedeion, a dirge or coronach, improvised by women over the bodies of the dead.[86] The lamentations of Helen and Andromache for Hector, and of the slave-girls for Patroclus, are Homeric instances of this species. Euripides imitates them in his tragedies—in the dirge sung by Antigone, for instance, in the Phœnissæ, and in the wailings of Hecuba for Astyanax in the Troades. A different kind of threnos were the songs of Linus, Hyacinth, Adonis, and others, to which I have already alluded in the beginning of this chapter. The finest extant specimen of this sort is Bion's Lament for Adonis, which, however, was composed in the idyllic age, when the hexameter had been substituted for the richer and more splendid lyric metres. A third class of threnos consisted of complex choral hymns composed by poets like Simonides or Pindar, to be sung at funeral solemnities. Many of our most precious lyric fragments, those which embody philosophical reflections on life and dim previsions of another world, belong to dirges of this elaborate kind.
Marriage festivals offered another occasion for lyric poetry. The hymeneal, sung during the wedding ceremony, the epithalamium, chanted at the house of the bridegroom, and many other species, have been defined by the grammarians. Unfortunately we possess nothing but the merest débris of any true Greek ode of this kind. Sappho's are the best. We have to study the imitations of her style in Catullus, the marriage chorus at the end of the Birds of Aristophanes, and the epithalamium of Helen by Theocritus, in order to form a remote conception of what a Sapphic marriage chorus might have been. In banquet songs we are more fortunate. Abundant are the parœnia of Alcæus, Anacreon, Theognis, and others. Scolia, or catches, so called from their irregular metrical structure, were also in vogue at banquets; and of these popular songs a sufficient number are preserved. A drunken passage in the works of Aristophanes brings before us after a lively fashion the ceremonies with which the scolion and the wine-cup circled the symposium together.[87] Of all these catches the most celebrated in ancient days was the panegyric of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, attributed to Callistratus. As I have the opportunity of printing from MS. a translation of this song by the late Professor Conington, I will introduce it here: