Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/126

 [102] horse making itself a slave to man in order to be revenged on the stag, was one of his warnings against the tyrant. When Phalaris triumphed, Stesichorus retired to Catana; where his octagonal grave outside the gate became in Roman times one of the sights of Sicily. Apart from such possible fragments of good tradition as may survive in the notorious forgeries called the Letters of Phalaris, we possess only one personal fact about his life. He was attacked with a disease of the eyes; and the thought preyed upon his mind that this was the divine wrath of Helen, of whom he had spoken in the usual way in some poem-perhaps the Helen or the Sack of Ilion. His pangs of conscience were intensified by historical difficulties. It was incredible that all Troy should have let itself be destroyed merely to humour Paris. If the Trojans would not give up Helen, it must have been that they never had her. Tisias burst into a recantation or 'Palinodia,' which remained famous: "That tale was never true! Thy foot never stepped on the benched galley, nor crossed to the towers of Troy." We cannot be sure what his own version was; it cannot well have been that of Herodotus and Euripides, which makes Helen elope to Egypt, though not to Troy. But, at any rate, he satisfied Helen, and recovered his sight. A very similar story is told of the Icelandic Skald Thormod.

The service that Stesichorus did to Greek literature is threefold: he introduced the peic saga into the West; he invented the stately narrative style of lyric; he vivified and remodelled, with the same mixture of boldness and simple faith as the Helen story, most of the great canonical legends. He is called "the lyric Homer," and described as "bearing the weight of the epos on his lyre." (Quint. x.I)