Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/123

 [99] daemonic followers of Bacchus, whom we find in such hordes on the early Attic drinking-vessels. We call them satyrs; but a satyr is a goat-daemon, and these have the ears and tail of a horse, like the centaurs. The difference is sentiment is not great: the centaurs are all the wild forces that crash and speed and make music in the Thessalian forests; the satyr is the Arcadian mountain-goat, the personification of the wildness, the music and mystery, of high mountains, the instincts that are at once above and below reason: his special personification is Pan, the Arcadian shepherd-god, who has nothing to do with Dionysus. When we are told the Arion "invented, taught, and named" the dithyramb in Corinth, it may mean that he first joined the old Dionysus-song with the Pan-idea; that he disguised his choir as satyrs. Corinth, the junction of Arcadia and the sea-world, would be the natural place for such a transition to take place. Thus the dithyramb was a goat-song, a 'tragoidia'; and it is from this, Aristotle tells us, that tragedy arose. It is remarkable that the dithyramb, after giving birth to tragedy, lived along with it and survived it. In Aristotle's time tragedy was practically dead, while its daughter, the new comedy, and its mother the Attic dithyramb, were still flourishing.

THE EARLY MASTERS

ALCMAN

The name ALCMAN is the Doric for Alcmaeon, and the bearer of it was a Laconian from Messoa (circa 615 B.C.). But Athenian imagination could never assimilate the idea