Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/96

 72 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE rebuilt the temple of Asclepios in Naupaktos. He had a disease of the eyes and was almost blind, when the god sent to him Anyte, the epic poetess, with a sealed tablet." Phalysios recovered, but we know no more of Anyte except that she was a native of Tegea, in Arcadia, and is once called 'the feminine Homer ' — by Antipater of Thessalonica, who has handed down to us many of her epigrams, and who may or may not haye read her epics. The descendants of Hesiod are more varied and more obscure. The genealogical epos has two lines of de- velopment. The ordinary form went on living in divers parts of Greece. We hear of the Naupaktian Verses, the Samian, the Phocsean ; but either they go without an author, or they are given to poets of local legend, the national equivalents of Hesiod — 'Karkinos' of Naupaktos, hand, the ' Eoie ' type produced the romantic or erotic elegy. This form of poetry in the hands of such masters as Mimnermus, Antimachus, and Hermesianax, takes the form of lists of bygone lovers, whose children are some- times given and sometimes not. It is the story of the ' Eoie' seen from a different point of view. When we hear how the 'great blue wave heaven-high' curled over the head of Tyro and took her to her sea-god, we think not of the royal pedigree, but of the wild romance of the story, the feeling in the heart of Enipeus or of Tyro. The didactic poetry of Hesiod developed on one side into the moralising or gnomic epics of Phocylides, the proverbs of the Seven Wise Men, the elegies of Solon and Theognis ; it even passed into the iambics of Semonides ^ Our Sillos-like fragment must be by another man, not a Samiaa
 * Eumelus ' of Corinth, ' Asius ' ^ of Samos. On the other