SECOND PERIOD OF GREEK LITERATURE.
CHAPTER XX.
§ 1. Early formation of a national literature in Greece, § 2. Athens subsequently takes the lead in literature and art. Her fitness for this purpose. § 3. Concurrence of the political circumstances of Athens to the same end. Solon. The Pisistratids. § 4. Great increase in the power of Athens after the Persian war. §5. Administration and policy of Pericles, particularly with respect to art and literature. § 6. Seeds of degeneracy in the Athenian Commonwealth at its most flourishing period. § 7. Causes and modes of the degeneracy. § 8. Literature and art were not affected by the causes of moral degeneracy.
§ 1. Greek literature, so far as we have hitherto followed its progress, was a common property of the different races of the nation; each race cultivating that species of composition which was best suited to its dispositions and capacities, and impressing on it a corresponding character. In this manner the town of Miletus in Ionia, the Æolians in the island of Lesbos, the colonies in Magna Graecia and Sicily, as well as the Greeks of the mother country, created new forms of poetry and eloquence. The various sorts of excellence thus produced, did not, after the age of the Homeric poetry, remain the exclusive property of the race among which they originated; as popular poems composed in a peculiar dialect are known only to the tribe by whom the dialect is spoken. Among the Greeks a national literature was early formed; every literary work in the Greek language, in whatever dialect it might be composed, was enjoyed by the whole Greek nation. The songs of the Lesbian Sappho aroused the feelings of Solon in his old age, notwithstanding their foreign Æolian dialect[1]; and the researches of the philosophers of Elea in Œnotria influenced the thoughts of Anaxagoras when living at Miletus and Athens[2]: whence it may be inferred, that the fame of remarkable writers soon spread through Greece at that time. Even in an earlier age, the poets and sages used to visit certain cities, which were considered almost as theatres, where they could bring their powers and acquirements into public notice. Among these, Sparta stood the highest, down to the time of the Persian war; for the Lacedæmonians, though they produced little themselves, were considered as sagacious and sound judges of art and philosophy[3]. Accordingly, the principal poets, musicians, and philosophers of those times are related to have passed a part of their lives at Sparta[4].
§ 2. But the literature of Greece necessarily assumed a different
- ↑ Ch. 13. § 10.
- ↑ Ch. 17. § 8.
- ↑ Aristot. Polit. VIII. 5. οἱ Λάκωνες . . . οὐ μανθάνοντες ὅμως δύνανται κρίνειν ἀρθῶς, ὡς φασὶ, τὰ χρηστὰ καὶ τὰ μὴ χρηστὰ τῶν μελῶν.
- ↑ For example, Archilochus, Terpander, Thaletas, Theognis, Pherecydes, Anaximander.
