Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/94

 70 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE poet PanyAsis of Halicarnassus : the name is Carian, but the man was the uncle of Herodotus, and met his death in a rebelHon against Lygdamis, the Carian governor of his native state. He wrote elegies as well as his epic. One Alexandrian critic puts Panyasis next to Homer among epic poets : generally, he came fourth, after Hesiod and Antimachus. In Quintilian he appears as a mixture of the last two writers — his matter more interesting than Hesiod' s, his arrangement better than that of Antimachus. The fragments are un-Homeric, but strong and well written. Accident has preserved us three pieces somewhat in the tone of the contemporary sympotic elegy. One speaker praises drink and the drinker with great spirit ; another answers that the first cup is to the Charites and Horai and Dionysus, the second to Aphrodite, the third is to Insolence and Ruin — '^ and so you had better go home to your zvedded wife!' Some of the lines haunt a reader's memory : " Demeter bare, and the great Craftsman bare, Sili>er A potto and Poseidon bare, To serve a year, a mortal master's thrall." Choirilus of Samos was also a friend of Herodotus, and followed him and yEschylus in taking the Persian invasion for his subject, and Athens for his heroine. We hear of him in the suite of the Spartan general Lysander — apparently as a domestic bard — and after- wards at the court of Archelaus of Macedon. His poem is the first ' historical ' epic in our sense of the word : an extant fragment complains that all legendary subjects are exhausted. The younger Choirilus who celebrated Alexander and has passed into legend as having been paid a gold philippus a line for very bad