are the ultimate and finished forms of passionate utterance, diamonds, topazes, and blazing rubies, in which the fire of the soul is crystallized forever. Adequately to translate Sappho was beyond the power of even Catullus: that love-ode which Longinus called "not one passion, but a congress of passions," and which a Greek physician copied into his book of diagnoses as a compendium of all the symptoms of corroding emotion, appears but languid in its Latin dress of "Ille mi par." Far less has any modern poet succeeded in the task: Rossetti, who deals so skilfully with Dante and Villon, is comparatively tame when he approaches Sappho. Instead of attempting, therefore, to interpret for English readers the charm of Sappho's style,[92] it is best to refer to pp. 874-924 of Bergk, where every vestige that is left of her is shrined.
Beside Sappho, Alcæus pales. His drinking-songs and war-songs have, indeed, great beauty; but they are not to be named in the same breath, for perfection of style, with the stanzas of Sappho. Of his life we know a few not wholly uninteresting incidents. He was a noble of Mitylene, the capital of Lesbos, where he flourished as early as 611 B.C. Alcæus belonged to a family of distinguished men. His brothers Cicis and Antimenidas upheld the party of the oligarchy against the tyrant Melanchrus; and during the troubles which agitated Mitylene after the fall of this despot, while other petty tyrants—Myrsilus, Megalagyrus, and the Cleanactids—were attempting to subdue the island, the three brothers ranged themselves uniformly on the side of the aristocracy. At first they seem to have been friendly with Pittacus. It was while fighting at his side against the Athenians at Sigeum that Alcæus threw his shield away—- an exploit which, like Archilochus, he celebrated in a poem without apparently damaging his reputation for valor. Being a stout soldier, a violent partisan, the bard of revolutions, and the brother of a pair of heroes, he could trifle with this little accident, which less doughty warriors must have concealed. When Pittacus was chosen Æsymnetes, or dictator with despotic power for the preservation of public order, in 589 B.C., Alcæus and his brothers went into opposition and were exiled. All three of them were what in modern politics we should call High Tories. They could not endure the least approach to popular government, the slightest infringement of the rights of the nobility. During his exile Alcæus employed his poetic faculty in vituperating Pittacus. His satires were esteemed almost as pungent as those of Archilochus. But the liberal-minded ruler did not resent them. When Alcæus was on one occasion taken prisoner, he set him free, remarking that "forgiveness is better than revenge." Alcæus lived to be reconciled with him and to recognize his merits. As a trait in the domestic life and fortunes of the Greeks of this time, it is worth mentioning that Alcæus took refuge in Egypt during his banishment from Lesbos, and that his brother Antimenidas entered the service of the king of Babylon. In the same way two Englishmen in the times of the Edwards might have travelled in Germany or become soldiers of the Republic of Florence. Of the Greek oligarch who lent his sword to Nebuchadnezzar—in his wars, perhaps, against Jehoiakim or Pharaoh-Necho—we get a curious glimpse. Alcæus greeted him on his return in a poem of which we possess a fragment, and which may be paraphrased thus:
From the ends of the earth thou art come
Back to thy home;
The ivory hilt of thy blade
With gold is embossed and inlaid;
Since for Babylon's host a great deed
Thou didst work in their need,
Slaying a warrior, an athlete of might,
Royal, whose height
Lacked of five cubits one span—
A terrible man.
We can fancy with what delight and curiosity Alcæus, who, as may be gathered from his poems, was an amateur of armor, examined this sword-handle, wrought perhaps from Ethiopian tusks by Egyptian artists, with lotos-flowers or patterns of crocodiles, monkeys, and lions. This story of the polished Greek citizen's adventure among the Jews and Egyptians, known to us through Holy Writ, touches our imagination with the same strange sense of novelty as when we read of the Persian poet Sâdy, a slave in the camp of Richard Cœur de Lion's Crusaders.
Considering the life Alcæus led, it is not strange that he should have sung of arms and civic struggles. Many fragments, preserved in all probability from the Stasiotica, or Songs of Sedition, which were very popular among the ancients, throw light upon the stormier passages of his history. One of these pieces[93] describes the poet's armory—his polished helmets and white horse-hair plumes, the burnished brazen greaves that hang upon the wall, the linen breastplates and bucklers thrown in heaps about the floor, with Chalkidian blades and girdles and tunics. The most striking point about this fragment is its foppery. Alcæus spares no pains to make us know how bright his armor is, how carefully his greaves are fixed against the wall by pegs you cannot see (πασσάλοις κρύπτοισι περικείμεναι), how carelessly the girdles and small gear are tossed about in sumptuous disarray. The poem seems to reveal a luxurious nature delighting in military millinery. No Dorian would have described his weapons from this point of view, but would have rather told us how often they had been used with effect in the field. The Æolian character is here tempered with Orientalism.
Of the erotic poems of Alcæus, only a very few and inconsiderable fragments have survived. Horace says of them, addressing his lyre:
Lesbio primum modulate civi,
Qui ferox bello, tamen inter arma,
Sive jactatam religârat udo
Littore navim,
Liberum et Musas Veneremque et illi
Semper hærentem puerum canebat;
Et Lycum nigris oculis nigroque
Crine decorum.[94]
Of Lycus we only know, on the authority of Cicero,[95] that he had a wart upon the finger, which Alcæus praised in one of his poems. It has also been conjectured that the line οἶνος, ὦ φίλε παί, καὶ ἀλάθεα—"wine, dear boy, and truth"—which Theocritus quotes as a proverb at the beginning of his Æolic Idyl, was addressed to Lycus. A fragment of far greater interest is the couplet preserved by Hephæstion,[96] in which Alcæus calls on Sappho by her name: "Violet-crowned, pure, sweet-smiling Sappho! I want to say something, but shame prevents me." To this declaration Sappho replied: "If thy wishes were fair and noble, and thy tongue designed not to utter what is base, shame would not cloud thine eyes, but thou wouldst speak thy just desires." This is all we know about the love-passages between the greatest lyrists of the Æolian school. In this way do the ancient critics tantalize us. Aristotle,[97] in order to illustrate a moral proposition, Hephæstion, with a view to proving a metrical rule, fling these scraps of their wealth forth, little dreaming that after twenty centuries the men of new nations and other thoughts will eagerly collect the scraps, and long for more of that which might have been so freely lavished. Whether Sappho wrote her reply in maidenly modesty because the advances of Alcæus were really dishonorable, or whether she affected indignation to conceal a personal dislike for the poet, we cannot say. Aristotle or Hephæstion might, probably, have been able to tell us. But the one was only thinking of the signs of shame, while the attention of the other was riveted upon the "so-called dodecasyllable Alcaic."
The most considerable remains of the lyrics of Alcæus are drinking-songs—praises of wine, combined with reflections upon life and appropriate descriptions of the different seasons. No time was amiss for drinking, to his mind: the heat of summer, the cold of winter, the blazing dog-star and the driving tempest, twilight with its cheerful gleam of lamps, mid-day with its sunshine—all suggest reasons for indulging in the cup. Not that we are justified in fancying Alcæus to have been a vulgar toper: he retained Æolian sumptuousness in his pleasures, and raised the art of drinking to an æsthetic altitude. One well-known piece from the Parœnia of Alcæus is capable of translation into Elizabethan rhymed verse as follows: