Studies of the Greek Poets (Vol 1 of 2)

by John Addington Symonds

But here arose a difficulty. With all their need of the highest and most elaborate poetry, with all their sensibility to beauty, the Dorians thought it beneath the dignity of a citizen to practise the arts. Their education, almost exclusively military and gymnastic, unfitted them, at all events in Sparta, for studies indispensable towards gaining proficiency in any science so elaborate as that of choral poetry. Drilled to abstinence, obedience, and silence, dwelling in a camp, without privacy or leisure, how could a Spartan, that automaton of the State, be expected to produce poetry, or excel in any fine art? A Spartan king, on being shown the most distinguished musician of his age, pointed to his cook as the best maker of black broth. Music, if music they must have; poetry, if poetry were required by some divinely implanted instinct; dancing, if dancing were a necessary compliment to the Deity, must be imported by these warriors from foreign lands. Thus the Spartans became the patrons of stranger artists, on whom they imposed their laws of taste. They pressed the flexible Ionian, the passionate Lesbian, the languid Lydian, the acute Athenian, into their service, and made them use the crabbed Dorian speech. They said: We want such and such odes for our choruses; we wish to amuse our youths and maidens, and to honor the gods with pompous harmonies; you, men of art, write for us, sing for us; but be careful to comprehend our character; and remember that, though you are Ionians or Lesbians, your inspiration must be Dorian. They got what they required. The so-called Dorian lyric is a genuine product of the Dorian race, although its greatest masters were foreigners and aliens. Much after the same fashion did England patronize Handel in the last century; in the same way may Handel's oratorios be called English music; for though the English are not musicians, and are diffident in general of the artist class, yet neither Germans nor Italians nor French have seen produced upon their soil such colossal works of art in the service of a highly intellectual religion.

It is interesting to reflect upon the influence of the Dorian race in the evolution of Greek art. That, as a nation, they possessed the germs of artistic invention, and that their character expressed itself very clearly in æsthetic forms, is evident from the existence of the Dorian style in architecture, and the Dorian mood in music, both of which reflect their broad simplicity and strength disdaining ornament. The same stamp they impressed upon Greek poetry, through the instruments they selected from other tribes. Had it not been for the strict legislation of Lycurgus, which, by forcing Sparta into a purely political development, and establishing a complete community of life among the citizens, checked the emergence of that individuality which is so all-important to the artist, Sparta might have counted her great sculptors, poets, musicians, orators, and painters, in rivalry with Pheidias, Sophocles, Damon, Pericles, Polygnotus. As it was, though without hands to paint and carve, without lips to sing and plead, the stubborn Dorian race set its seal on a wide field of Greek art.[100]

The elaborate works of the choral lyrists may be regarded as the highly wrought expansions of rudiments already existing among the Dorians. Alcman, Arion, and Stesichorus, the three masters who formed choral poetry from the materials indicated to us in the poems of Homer, and who had to blend in one harmonious whole the sister arts of dancing, music, and poetry, so as to present a pompous appeal to the intellect through speech, and through the ear and eye, found ready to their hands such simple songs as may be read in Bergk, pp. 1297-1303. The dithyramb of the women of Elis: "Come, hero, Dionysus, to the holy sea-temple, attended by the Graces, and rushing on with oxen-hoof! Holy ox! Holy ox!" The chorus of the old men, men, and boys at Sparta: "We once were stalwart youths: we are; if thou likest, try our strength: we shall be; and far better too!" The march-song of the Spartans in their rhythmic revels: "Advance, boys, set your feet forward, and dance in the reel better still." From these had to be trained the complex and magnificent work of art, which culminated in a Pythian ode of Pindar! Alcman was a native of Sardis, and a slave of Agesilaus the Spartan. He flourished at Sparta between 671 and 631 B.C., composing Parthenia for the maidens of Taygetus. Who does not know his lines upon the valley of Eurotas? "Sleep holds the mountain summits and ravines, the promontories and the watercourses; leaves, and creeping things, and whatsoever black earth breeds; and wild beasts of the hills, and bees, and monsters in the hollows of the dark blue deep; and all the wide-winged birds are sleeping." Junior to Alcman was Arion, who spent most of his time with Periander at Corinth. His contribution to choral poetry was the elaboration of the dithyramb. But of his work we have unfortunately not a single fragment left. The piece that bears his name (Bergk, p. 872) has to be ascribed to some tolerable poet of the Euripidean period. His life is involved in mythology; most beautiful is the oft-told tale of his salvation from the sea waves by an enamoured dolphin—a fish, by the way, which Athenæus dignified by the title of φιλῷδος τε καὶ φίλαυλος (song-loving and flute-loving), and which Aristotle calls φιλάνθρωπος (affectionate to men). Rather more is known about Stesichorus. He was a native of Himera in Sicily, but possibly a Locrian by descent. His parents called him Tisias, but he took his more famous name from his profession. Stesichorus is a title that might have been given to any chorus-master in a Greek city; but Tisias of Himera won it by being emphatically the author of the choric system. Antiquity recognized in him the inventor of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, with the corresponding movements of the dance, which were designated the Triad of Stesichorus. A remark made by Quintilian about this poet—that he sustained the burden of the epos with his lyre—forms a valuable criticism on his style. In the days of Stesichorus, the epic proper had lost its vitality; but people still felt the liveliest interest in heroic legends, and loved to connect the celebration of the past with their ceremonies. A lyrical poet had therefore so to treat the myths of Hellas that choruses should represent them in their odes and semi-dramatic dances. It is probable that Stesichorus made far more use of mythical material than Pindar, dealing with it less allusively and adhering more closely to the epic form of narrative. When we hear of his ode, the Orestea, being divided into three books (whatever that may mean), and read the titles of the rest—Cerberus, Cycnus, Scylla, Europa, the Sack of Troy, the Nostoi, and Geryonis—we are led to suspect that his choral compositions were something of the nature of mediæval mystery-plays—semi-lyrical, semi-dramatic poems, founded on the religious legends of the past. Stesichorus did not confine himself to this species of composition, but wrote hymns, encomia, and pæans, like other professional lyrists who succeeded him, and invented a curious kind of love-tale from real life. One of these romantic poems, called Calycé, was about a girl who loved purely but unhappily, and died. Another, called Rhadina, told the forlorn tale of a Samian brother and sister put to death by a cruel tyrant. It is a pity that these early Greek novels in verse are lost. We might have found in them the fresh originals of Daphnis and Chloe, or of the romances of Tatius and Heliodorus. Finally, Stesichorus composed fables, such as the Horse and the Stag, and pastorals upon the death of Daphnis, in which he proved himself true to his Sicilian origin, and anticipated Theocritus. Enough has been said about Stesichorus to show that he was a richly inventive genius—one of those facile and abundant natures who excel in many branches of art, and who give hints by which posterity may profit. Yet with all his genius he was not thoroughly successful. His pastorals and romances were abandoned by his successors; his epical lyrics were lost in the tragic drama. Like many other poets, he failed by coming at a wrong moment, or else by adhering to forms of art which could not long remain in vogue. In his attempt to reconcile the epical treatment of mythology with the choric system of his own invention, he proved that he had not fully grasped the capabilities of lyrical poetry. In his endeavor to create an idyllic and romantic species, he was far before his age.

The remaining choral poets of the Dorian style, of whom the eldest, Ibycus, dates half a century later than Arion, received from their predecessors an instrument of poetical expression already nearly complete. It was their part to use it as skilfully as possible, and to introduce such changes as might render it more polished. Excellence of workmanship is particularly noticeable in what remains of Ibycus, Simonides, Bacchylides. These latter lyrists are no longer local poets: under the altered circumstances of Hellas at the time of the Persian war, art has become Panhellenic, the artists cease to be the servants of one state or of one deity; they range from city to city, giving their services to all who seek for them, and embracing the various tribes and religious rites of the collected Greeks in their æsthetic sympathy. Now, for the first time, poets began to sell their songs of praise for money. Simonides introduced the practice, which had something shocking in it to Greek taste, and which Plato especially censures as sophistic and illiberal in his Protagoras. Now, too, poets became the friends and counsellors of princes, mixing freely in the politics of Samos, Syracuse, Agrigentum, Thessaly; aiding the tyrants Polycrates, Hiero, Theron, the Scopads, with their advice. Simonides is said to have suspended hostilities between Theron and Hiero by his diplomatic intercession after their armies had been drawn up in battle-array. Petrarch did not occupy a more important place among the princes and republics of mediæval Italy. Under these new conditions, and with this expansion of the poet's calling, the old character of the Dorian lyric changed. The title Dorian is now merely nominal, and the dialect is a conventional language consecrated to this style.

Ibycus was a native of Rhegium, a colony of mixed Ionians and Dorians. To which of these families he belonged is not certain. If we judged by the internal evidence of his poems, we should call him an Ionian; for they are distinguished by voluptuous sweetness, with a dash of almost Æolian intensity. Ibycus was a poet-errant, carrying his songs from state to state. The beautiful story of the cranes who led to the discovery of his murder at Corinth, though probably mythical, like that of Arion's dolphin, illustrates the rude lives of these Greek troubadours, and shows in what respect the sacer vates, servant of the Muses and beloved of Phœbus, was held by the people. Ibycus was regarded by antiquity as a kind of male Sappho. His odes, composed for birthday festivals and banquets, were dedicated chiefly to the praise of beautiful youths; and the legends which adorned them, like those of Ganymede or Tithonus, were appropriate to the erotic style. Aristophanes, in the Thesmophoriazusæ, makes Agathon connect him with Anacreon and Alcæus, as the three refiners of language. It is clear, therefore, that in his art Ibycus adapted the manner of Dorian poetry to the matter of Æolian or Ionian love-chants. Of his poetry we have but few fragments. The following seems to strike the keynote of his style: "Love once again looking upon me from his cloud-black brows, with languishing glances, drives me by enchantments of all kinds to the endless nets of Cypris: verily I tremble at his onset, as a chariot-horse, who hath won prizes, in old age goes grudgingly to try his speed in the swift race of cars." In another piece he compares the onset of Love to a downrush of the Thracian north wind armed with lightning. This fragment, numbered first in Bergk's Collection, is taken from Athenæus, who quotes it to prove the vehement emotion of the poet:

In spring Cydonian apple-trees,
Watered by fountains ever flowing
Through crofts unmown of maiden goddesses,
And young vines, 'neath the shade
Of shooting tendrils, tranquilly are growing.
Meanwhile for me Love never laid
In slumber, like a north-wind glowing
With Thracian lightnings, still doth dart
Blood-parching madness on my heart,
From Kupris hurtling, stormful, wild,
Lording the man as erst the child.

It is interesting to compare the different metaphors whereby the early lyrists imaged the assaults of the Love-god. Sappho describes him in one place as a youth arrayed with a flame-colored chlamys descending from heaven; in another she calls him "a limb-dissolving, bitter-sweet, impracticable wild beast;" again, she compares the state of her soul under the influence of love to oak-trees torn and shaken by a mountain whirlwind. Anacreon paints a fine picture of Love like a blacksmith, forging his soul and tempering it in icy torrents. The dubious winged figure armed with a heavy sword, which is carved upon the recently discovered column from the Temple of Ephesus, if he be the Love-god, and not, as some conjecture, Death, seems to have been conceived in the spirit of these energetic metaphors. The Greeks, at the period of Anacreon and Ibycus, were far from having as yet imagined the baby Cupid of Moschus, the Epigrammatists, and the Alexandrian Anacreontics. He was still a terrible and passion-stirring power—no mere malicious urchin coming by night with drenched wings and unstrung bow to reward the poet's hospitality by wounding him; no naughty boy who runs away from his mother and steals honeycombs, no bee-like elf asleep in rosebuds.

Simonides is a far more brilliant representative than Ibycus, both of Greek choral poetry in its prime, and also of the whole literary life of Hellas during the period which immediately preceded and followed the Persian war. He was born in the island of Ceos, of pure Ionian blood and breeding; but the Ionians of Ceos were celebrated for their σωφροσύνη (reserve, or self-restraint), a quality strongly marked in the poems of Simonides. In his odes we do not trace that mixture of Æolian passion and that concentration upon personal emotions which are noticeable in those of Ibycus, but rather a Dorian solemnity of thought and feeling, qualifying Simonides for the arduous functions to which he was called, of commemorating in elegy and epigram and funeral ode the achievements of Hellas against Persia. Simonides belonged to a family of professional poets; for the arts among the early Greeks were hereditary; a father taught the trade of flute-playing and chorus-leading and verse-making to his son, who, if he had original genius, became a great poet, as was the fate of Pindar; or, if he were endowed with commonplace abilities, remained a journeyman in art without discredit to himself, performing useful functions in his native place.[101] Simonides exercised his calling of chorus-teacher at Carthæa in Ceos, and lived at the χορηγεῖον, or resort of the chorus, near the temple of Apollo. But the greater portion of his life, after he had attained celebrity, was passed with patrons—with Hipparchus, who invited him to Athens, where he dwelt at amity with Anacreon, and at enmity with Pindar's master, Lasos; with the Scopads and Aleuads of Thessaly, for whom he composed the most touching threnoi and the most brilliant panegyrics, of which fragments have descended to us; finally, with Hiero of Syracuse, who honored him exceedingly, and when he died consigned him to the earth with princely funeral pomp. The relations of Simonides to these patrons may be gathered from numerous slight indications, none of which are very honorable to his character. For instance, after receiving the hospitality of Hipparchus, he composed an epigram for the statue of Harmodius, in which he calls the murder of the tyrant "a great light rising upon Athens." Again, he praised the brutal Scopas, son of Creon, in an ode which is celebrated, both as being connected with the most dramatic incident in the poet's life, and also as having furnished Plato with a theme for argument, and Aristotle with an ethical quotation—"To be a good man in very truth, a square without blame, is hard." This proposition Plato discusses in the Protagoras, while Aristotle cites the phrase, τετράγωνος ἄνευ ψόγου (four-square without fault). From the general tenor of the fragments of this ode, from Plato's criticism, and from what is known about the coarse nature of Scopas, who is being praised, we must conjecture that Simonides attempted to whitewash his patron's character by depreciating the standard of morality. With Ionian facility and courtly compliment, he made excuses for a bad man by pleading that perfect goodness was unattainable. Scopas refused to pay the price required by Simonides for the poem in question, telling him to get half of it from the Dioscuri, who had also been eulogized. This was at a banquet. While the king was laughing at his own rude jest, a servant whispered to the poet that two goodly youths waited without, desiring earnestly to speak with him. Simonides left the palace, but found no one. Even as he stood looking for his visitors, he heard the crash of beams and the groans of dying men. Scopas with his guests had been destroyed by the falling of the roof, and Simonides had received a godlike guerdon from the two sons of Tyndareus. This story belongs, perhaps, to the same class as the cranes of Ibycus and the dolphin of Arion. Yet there seems to be no doubt that the Scopad dynasty was suddenly extinguished; for we hear nothing of them at the time of the Persian war, and we know that Simonides composed a threnos for the family.

The most splendid period of the life of Simonides was that which he passed at Athens during the great wars with Persia. Here he was the friend of Miltiades, Themistocles, and Pausanias. Here he composed his epigrams on Marathon, Thermopylæ, Salamis, Platæa—poems not destined to be merely sung or consigned to parchment, but to be carved in marble or engraved in letters of imperishable bronze upon the works of the noblest architects and statuaries. The genius of Simonides is unique in this branch of monumental poetry. His couplets—calm, simple, terse, strong as the deeds they celebrate, enduring as the brass or stone which they adorned—animated succeeding generations of Greek patriots; they were transferred to the brains of statesmen like Pericles and Demosthenes, inscribed upon the fleshy tablets of the hearts of warriors like Cleomenes, Pelopidas, Epaminondas. We are thrice fortunate in possessing the entire collection of these epigrams, unrivalled for the magnitude of the events they celebrate, and for the circumstances under which they were composed. When we reflect what would have become of the civilization of the world but for these Greek victories—when we remember that the events which these few couplets record transcend in importance those of any other single period of history—we are almost appalled by the contrast between the brevity of the epigrams and the world-wide vastness of their matter. In reviewing the life of Simonides, after admitting that he was greedy of gain and not adverse to flattery, we are bound to confess that, as a poet, he proved himself adequate to the age of Marathon and Salamis. He was the voice of Hellas—the genius of Fame, sculpturing upon her brazen shield with a pen of adamant, in austere letters of indelible gold, the achievements to which the whole world owes its civilization. Happy poet! Had ever any other man so splendid a heritage of song allotted to him?