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 a clear tendency towards rhyme. There are similar traces of intentional rhyme in Homer and Aeschylus (Sept. 778ff., 785ff.); whereas the orators and Sophocles, amid all their care for euphony in other respects, admit tiresome rhyming jangles with a freedom which can only be the result of unsensitiveness to that particular relation of sounds.

ARION

ARION of Methymna, in Lesbos, is famous in legend as the inventor of the dithyramb, and for his miraculous preservation at sea: some pirates forced him to 'walk the plank'; but they had allowed him to make music once before he died, and when he sprang overboard, the dolphins who had gathered to listen, carried him on their backs to Mount Taenarum. It is an old saga-motive, applied to Phalanthos, son of Poseidon, in Tarentum, to Enalos at Lesbos, and to the sea-spirits Palaemon, Melikertes, Glaucus, at other places. Arion's own works disappeared early; Aristophanes of Byzantium could not find any (2nd cent. B.C.), though an interesting piece of fourth-century dithyramb in which the singer represents Arion, has been handed down to us as his through a mistake of Aelian.

STESICHORUS

The greatest figure in early choric poetry is that of TISIAS, surnamed STESICHORUS ('Choir-setter') of Himera. The man was a West-Locrian from Matauros, but became a citizen of Himera in the long struggles against Phalaris of brazen-bull celebrity. The old fable of the