he alludes as ungrateful and undutiful. Probably they had been estranged from him during his absence by the influence of the party in power, and they may also have been ill pleased at his devotion to the artistic pursuits which ministered to his substance in exile and loss of fortune. To the end of his days, peaceful it should seem and undisturbed thenceforward, he fulfilled his destiny as a "servant of the Muses," recognising it as a duty to spread the fruit of his poetic genius, rather than, as in his earlier years, to limit it to his inner circle of friends and relatives:—
In secret, like a miser with his pelf."—(F.)
It would be unhandsome in us to take leave of Theognis without a word of felicitation to the poet's shade on the happy rehabilitation which he has met with at the hands of modern scholars. Time was—a time not so very long ago—when the comparatively few who were acquainted with the remains of Theognis saw in him simply a stringer together of maxims in elegiac verse, such as Xenophon had accounted him; and Isocrates had set him down in the same category with Hesiod and Phocylides. But, thanks to the Germans, Welcker and Müller, and to the scholarly Englishman, John Hookham Frere, the elegiac poet of Megara has been proved to be something more than a compiler of didactic copy-slips—a scholar, poet, and politician in one, with a biography belonging to him, the threads of
