POETS OF THE EPIC CYCLE.
- Arcti’nus of Mile’tus.
His poem of 9,100 verses had Memnon, an Ethiopian chief, for its hero. It treated of the part taken in the Trojan War by the Amazons, who arrived after Hector’s funeral; the death of their queen, Penthesile’a, at the hand of Achilles; the fall of Achilles himself; and the sack of Troy. - Les’ches of Mytile’ne.
Author of the Little Iliad, a supplement to the greater work of that name; it took up the narrative where Homer leaves off, and carried it to the fall of Troy. - Stasi’nus of Cyprus.
Wrote the Cypria, in eleven books, narrating the events that preceded the Trojan War, and the incidents of the first nine years of the siege. - A’gias the Trœzenian.
His epic in five books, called Nostoi (the Returns), was descriptive of the home-voyages of the Greek heroes. - Eu’gamon of Cyre’ne.
The Telegonia, a continuation of the Odyssey to the death of Ulysses, who falls by the hand of Teleg’onus, his son by Cir’ce.
NOTES ON GREEK WRITING, ETC.
The language of epic poetry perhaps once the common tongue of the people, and merely elaborated by the bards. The art of writing, old in Greece; while there is no positive evidence of its being known before 800 B.C., the historian Herodotus (450 B.C.) speaks as if it had been familiar to his countrymen for hundreds of years. Homer’s epics, though by some thought to have been handed down by oral repetition, probably written on metallic or wooden tablets by their author. Hesiod’s works originally committed to leaden tables and deposited in the temple of the Bœotian Muses.
Greek papyrus-factories on the Nile, 650 B.C. Writing first extensively used by priests and bards, particularly at the temple of Delphi.
(The student is further recommended to read Cox’s “Mythology of the Aryan Nations,” vol. ii., Harrison’s “Myths of the Odyssey,” Coleridge’s “Minor Poems of Homer,” Tyler’s “Theology of the Greek Poetry,” and Mahaffy’s “History of Classical Greek Literature” vol. i., and “Social Life in Greece.”)
CHAPTER III.
LYRIC POETRY.
Rise of Lyric Poetry.—For more than two hundred years after Homer and Hesiod, no one worthy of the name of poet appeared in Greece. Greek genius seemed to have exhausted itself. A few feeble imitators of the great master, and epic poetry was no more. The spirit of the Iliad and the Odyssey died with the monarchies whose chieftains they immortalized. When popular governments arose, the bard no longer celebrated the gods and demigods of the past, or traced the genealogies of kings, but sung the glories of his country, or poured forth without restraint the emotions of his soul. Thus lyric poetry was the child of liberty.