Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/119

 understand him, and he ripples into music. But the false poems are even more Anacreontic than Anacreon. Compared with them the real Anacreon has great variety of theme and of metre, and even some of the stateliness and reserved strength of the sixth century. Very likely our whole conception of the man would be higher, were it not for the incessant imitations which have fixed him as a type of the festive and amorous septuagenarian.

These three poets represent the personal lyric of Greece. In Alcaeus it embraces all sides of an adventurous and perhaps patriotic life; in Sappho it expresses with a burning intensity the inner life, the passions that are generally silent; in Anacreon it spreads out into light snatches of song about simple enjoyments, sensual and imaginative. The personal lyric never reached the artistic grandeur, the religious and philosophic depth of the choric song. It is significant of our difficulty in really appreciating Greek poetry, that we are usually so much more charmed by the style which all antiquity counted as easier and lower.

THE CHOIR-SONG - GENERAL

Besides the personal lyric, there had existed in Greece at a time earlier than our earliest records the practice of celebrating important occasions by the dance and song of a choir. The occasion might of course be public or private; it was always in early times more or less religious-a victory, a harvest, a holy day, a birth, death, or marriage. At the time that we first know the choir-song it always implies a professional poet, a band of professional performers, and generally a new production