formed in Attica, for the use of rhapsodists. The style is that of the Ionian or Homeric epos; but there are also several traces of the Hesiodic or Boeotian school. The principal “hymns” are (1) to Apollo (generally treated as two or more hymns combined in one); (2) to Hermes; (3) to Aphrodite; and (4) to Demeter. The hymn to Apollo, quoted by Thucydides (iii. 104) as Homer’s, is of peculiar interest on account of the lines describing the Ionian festival at Delos. Two celebrated pieces of a sportive kind passed under Homer’s name. The Margites—a comic poem on one “who knew many things but knew them all badly”—is regarded by Aristotle as the earliest germ of comedy, and was possibly as old as 700 B.C. Only a few lines remain. The Batracho(myo)machia, or Battle of the Frogs and Mice probably belongs to the decline of Greek literature, perhaps to the 2nd century B.C.[1] About 300 verses of it are extant.
In the Iliad and the Odyssey the personal opinions or sympathies of the poet may sometimes be conjectured, but they are not declared or even hinted. Hesiod, indeed, sometimes gives us a glimpse of his own troubles or views. Yet Hesiod is, on the whole, essentially a prophet. Transition from
epos to elegy.The message which he delivers is not from himself; the truths which he imparts have not been discovered by his own search. He is the mouthpiece of the Delphian Apollo. Personal opinion and feeling may tinge his utterance, but they do not determine its general complexion. The egotism is a single thread; it is not the basis of the texture. Epic poetry was in Greece the foundation of all other poetry; for many centuries no other kind was generally cultivated, no other could speak to the whole people. Politically, the age was monarchical or aristocratic; intellectually, it was too simple for the analysis of thought or emotion. Kings and princes loved to hear of the great deeds of their ancestors; common men loved to hear of them too, for they had no other interest. The mind of Greece found no subject of contemplation so attractive as the warlike past of the race, or so useful as that lore which experience and tradition had bequeathed. But in the course of the 8th century B.C. the rule of hereditary princes began to disappear. Monarchy gave place to oligarchy, and this—often after the intermediate phase of a tyrannis—to democracy. Such a change was necessarily favourable to the growth of reflection. The private citizen is no longer a mere cipher, the Homeric τις, a unit in the dim multitude of the king-ruled folk; he gains more power of independent action, his mental horizon is widened, his life becomes fuller and more interesting. He begins to feel the need of expressing the thoughts and feelings that are stirred in him. But as yet a prose literature does not exist; the new thoughts, like the old heroic stories, must still be told in verse. The forms of verse created by this need were the Elegiac and the Iambic.
The elegiac metre is, in form, a simple variation on the epic metre, obtained by docking the second of two hexameters so as to make it a verse of five feet or measures. But the poetical capabilities of the elegiac couplet are of a wholly different kind from those of heroic verse. ἔλεγος seems Elegy.to be the Greek form of a name given by the Carians and Lydians to a lament for the dead. This was accompanied by the soft music of the Lydian flute, which continued to be associated with Greek elegy. The non-Hellenic origin of elegy is indicated by this very fact. The flute was to the Greeks an Asiatic instrument—string instruments were those which they made their own—and it would hardly have been wedded by them to a species of poetry which had arisen among themselves. The early elegiac poetry of Greece was by no means confined to mourning for the dead. War, love, politics, proverbial philosophy, were in turn its themes; it dealt, in fact, with the chief interest of the poet and his friends, whatever that might be at the time. It is the direct expression of the poet’s own thoughts, addressed to a sympathizing society. This is its first characteristic. The second is that, even when most pathetic or most spirited, it still preserves, on the whole, the tone of conversation or of narrative. Greek elegy stops short of lyric passion. English elegy, whether funereal as in Dryden and Pope, or reflective as in Gray, is usually true to the same normal type. Roman elegy is not equally true to it, but sometimes tends to trench on the lyric province. For Roman elegy is mainly amatory or sentimental; and its masters imitated, as a rule, not the early Greek elegists, not Tyrtaeus or Theognis, but the later Alexandrian elegists, such as Callimachus or Philetas. Catullus introduced the metre to Latin literature, and used it with more fidelity than his followers to its genuine Greek inspiration.
Elegy, as we have seen, was the first slight deviation from epos. But almost at the same time another species arose which had nothing in common with epos, either in form or in spirit. This was the iambic. The word ἴαμβος, iambus (ἰάπτειν, to dart or shoot) was used in reference Iambic verse.to the licensed raillery at the festivals of Demeter; it was the maiden Iambe, the myth said, who drew the first smile from the mourning goddess. The iambic metre was at first used for satire; and it was in this strain that it was chiefly employed by its earliest master of note, Archilochus of Paros (670 B.C.). But it was adapted to the expression generally of any pointed thought. Thus it was suitable to fables. Elegiac and iambic poetry both belong to the borderland between epic and lyric. While, however, elegy stands nearer to epos, iambic stands nearer to the lyric. Iambic poetry can express the personal feeling of the poet with greater intensity than elegy does; on the other hand, it has not the lyric flexibility, self-abandonment or glow. As we see in the case of Solon, iambic verse could serve for the expression of that deeper thought, that more inward self-communing, for which the elegiac form would have been inappropriate.
But these two forms of poetry, both Ionian, the elegiac and the iambic, belong essentially to the same stage of the literature. They stand between the Ionian epos and the lyric poetry of the Aeolians and Dorians. The earliest of the Greek elegists, Callinus and Tyrtaeus, use elegy to rouse a warlike spirit in sinking hearts. Archilochus too wrote warlike elegy, but used it also in other strains, as in lament for the dead. The elegy of Mimnermus of Smyrna or Colophon is the plaintive farewell of an ease-loving Ionian to the days of Ionian freedom. In Solon elegy takes a higher range; it becomes political and ethical.[2] Theognis represents the maturer union of politics with a proverbial philosophy. Another gnomic poet was Phocylides of Miletus; an admonitory poem extant under his name is probably the work of an Alexandrine Jewish Christian. Xenophanes gives a philosophic strain to elegy. With Simonides of Ceos it reverts, in an exquisite form, to its earliest destination, and becomes the vehicle of epitaph on those who fell in the Persian Wars. Iambic verse was used by Simonides (or Semonides) of Amorgus, as by Archilochus, for satire—but satire directed against classes rather than persons. Solon’s iambics so far preserve the old associations of the metre that they represent the polemical or controversial side of his political poetry. Hipponax of Ephesus was another iambic satirist—using the σκάζων (“limping”) or choliambic verse, produced by substituting a spondee for an iambus in the last place. But it was not until the rise of the Attic drama that the full capabilities of iambic verse were seen.
The lyric poetry of early Greece may be regarded as the final form of that effort at self-expression which in the elegiac and iambic is still incomplete. The lyric expression is deeper and more impassioned. Its intimate union with music and with the rhythmical movement of Lyric poetry.the dance gives to it more of an ideal character. At the same time the continuity of the music permits pauses to the voice—pauses necessary as reliefs after a climax. Before lyric poetry could be effective, it was necessary that some progress should have been made in the art of music. The instrument used by the Greeks to accompany the voice was the four-stringed lyre, and the first great epoch in Greek music was when Terpander of Lesbos (660 B.C.), by adding three strings, gave the lyre the
