Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/75

 HYMN TO DEMETER 51 than anything else in Greek hteratiire that frank joy in physical life and beauty which is often supposed to be characteristic of Greece. The long hymn to Demeter, extant in only one MS., which was discovered last century at Moscow 'among pigs and chickens,' is perhaps the most beautiful of all. It is interesting as an early Attic or Eleusinian composition. Parts are perhaps rather fluent and weak, but most of the poem is worthy of the magnificent myth on which it is founded. Take one piece at the opening, where Persephone "was playing with Okeanos' deep-breasted daughters, and pluck- ing flowers, roses and crocus and pretty pansies, in a soft meadow, and flags and hyacinth, and that great narcissus that Earth sent up for a snare to the rose-face maiden, doing service by Gods zvill to Him of the Many Guests. The bloom of it was wonderful, a marvel for gods undying and mortal men ; from the root of it there grew out a hundred heads, and the incensed smell of it made all the wide sky laugh above, and all the earth laugh and the salt swell of the sea. And the girl in wonder reached out both her hands to take the beautiful thing to play with ; then yawned the broad-trod ground by the Flat of Nysa, and the deathless steeds brake forth, and the Cronos-born king. He of the Many Names, of the Many Guests ; and He swept her azvay on his golden chariot." The dark splendour of Aidoneus, " Him of the Many Thralls, of the Matiy Guests," is in the highest spirit of the saga. Comic Poems Of the Comic Poems which passed in antiquity as Homer's, the only extant example is the Battle of the Frogs and Mice, rather a good parody of the fighting