lochus with his own Iambic,” says Horace; and the story is told how he drove the daughters of Lycambes to hang themselves by the bitterness of his attacks. There is little in the fragments that remain to explain such a story, though there is a truculent tone and a suggestion of personal attack in most of the lines: “One great lesson I have learnt, to retaliate on those who use me ill with a sharp return of evil.” Yet he is the earliest to enunciate one generous sentiment which has become proverbial: “'Tis no noble thing to malign the dead.”
Simonides of Amorgos (about B.C. 660) seems to have taken a melancholy view of men and things. One of the two considerable extracts that survive contains a catalogue of the miseries of man—his helplessness in the presence of fate, his baffled hopes, the brevity of his life and the various accidents that bring it to an end. The other is a curious satire on women whose bad qualities he deduces from the several beasts of which they are compounded; yet in another short fragment he can say:—
“A man can find no better prize in life |
The shortness of life and the endlessness of death he perhaps thought balanced each other:—
“Death, were we wise, would seem but one long day.”
“The time for being dead for man is long, |
