Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/104

 8o LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE The oldest known elegist, CallInus, comes from Ephesus, and writes in a dialect like that used in the Ionic parts of Homer. His w-ars are partly against the invading Kimmerians (about 650 B.C.), partly against the town of Magnesia. He was about contemporary with the great Archilochus (p. 86) ; but Callinus speaks of Magnesia as still fighting, while Archilochus mentions its fall. Tyrt^US of Aphidna wrote elegiac war-songs for the Spartans in the Second Messenian War (685-668 B.C.), and speaks as a Dorian noble, a Spartiate. But there was an Aphidna in Attica as well as in Laconia ; and Athenian malice remodelled an old joke into the anec- dote that Sparta, hard pressed in the war, had sent to Athens for a leader, and that Athens had sent them a lame schoolmaster, who woke the dull creatures up, and led them to victory. In the same spirit, the Samians used to tell how they lent the men of Priene a pro- phetess to help them against the Carians — even a Samian old woman could teach the Prieneans how to fight ! Tyrtccus becomes a semi-comic character in the late non-Spartan tradition— for instance, in the Messe- nian epic of Rhianus (third century B.C.) ; but his Doric name, the fact that his songs were sung in Crete as well as in the Peloponnese, and the traditional honours paid to him at Lacedaemonian feasts, suggest that he was a personification of the Doric war-elegy, and that all authorless Doric war-songs became his property — for instance, the somewhat unarchaic lines quoted by the orator Lycurgus. The poems were, of course, originally in Doric; but our fragments have been worked over into Ionic dress,! ^nd modernised. The collection, which includes some anapaestic marching-songs, comes from ^ Cf. the mixture d (piXoxprifJ-a^iv ^Trdprav dei.