as a teacher of wisdom and virtue, by means of detached maxims and apothegms in elegiac verse, and would probably have been loath to recognise any element in his poetry which was personal or limited to particular times and situations; yet it is now fully established that he was one of the same section of poets with Callinus, Tyrtæus, Solon, and Phocyllides, all of whom availed themselves of a form of versification, the original function of which was probably to express mournful sentiments, to inspire their countrymen with their own feelings as to the stirring themes of war and patriotism, of politics, and of love. With Theognis it is clear that the elegy was a song or poem sung at banquets or symposia after the libation, and between the pauses of drinking, to the sound of the flute; and, furthermore, that it was addressed not as elsewhere to the company at large, but to a single guest. Many such elegies were composed by him to friends and boon-companions, as may be inferred from his remains, and from the tradition which survives, that he wrote an elegy to the Sicilian Megarians on their escape from the siege of their city by Gelon (483 B.C.); but owing to the partiality of a later age for the maxims and moral sentiments with which these elegies were interspersed, and which, as we learn from Xenophon and Isocrates, were used in their day for educational purposes, the shape in which the poetry of Theognis has come down to us is as unlike the original form and drift as a handbook of maxims from Shakespeare is unlike an undoctored and un-Bowdlerised play. Thanks to the German editor Welcker, and to
