Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/129

 in enlarging the field of poetry. He was the first to feel the essence of beauty in various legends which lived in humble places: in the death of the cowherd Daphnis for shame at having once been false to his love (that rich motive for all pastoral poetry afterwards); in the story of the fair Kalyke, who died neglected; of the ill-starred Rhadina, who loved her cousin better than the tyrant of Corinth. This is a very great achievement. It is what Euripides did for the world again a little later, when the mind of Greece, freeing itself from the stiffer Attic tradition, was ready to understand.

THE MIDDLE PERIOD

IBYCUS

IBYCUS of Rhegion, nearly two generations later than Stesichorus, led a wandering life in the same regions of Greece, passing on to the courts of Polycrates and Periander. Like Arion, he is best known to posterity by a fabulous story-of his murder being avenged by cranes, 'ibykes.' His songs for boy-choirs are specially praised. He is said to have shown an 'Aeolo-Ionic spirit' in songs of Dorian language and music, and the charming fragments full of roses and women's attire and spring and strange birds (Cf. No.8.), and "bright sleepless dawn awaking the nightingales," show well what this means. It is curious that the works of Stesichorus were sometimes attributed to him-for instance, the Games at Pelias's Funeral. Our remains of the two have little in common except the metre.