Page:A History of Ancient Greek Literature.djvu/97

 POETRY OF SCIENCE AND RELIGION 73 of Amorgos, Archilochus, Hipponax (see p. 88). On another side, it gave rise to the poetry of science and learning. The master himself was credited with an Astronomy* and a Tour of the Earth;* but such subjects for epos cannot generally be traced to any definite authors before the fourth century, and were not popular before the time of Aratus of Soli {ca. 276 B.C.). The first astronomical poet on record, Kleostratos of Tenedos, who watched the stars from Mount Ida, is said to belong to the sixth century. The first medical poem is perhaps by one Periander, of the fourth. The epics on cookery, which we hear of in Athenaeus, were parodies rather than dissertations. The arch-gourmand Archestratos of Gela was a contemporary of Aristotle ; so was Matron. It was the time of the Middle Comedy, when food and the cooking of it were recognised as humorous subjects. But the main stream of didactic epos in early times became religious. ' Hesiod ' fell under the influence of ' Orpheus.' Even the traditional poems were affected in this way. Kerkops, the alleged * real author ' of cer- tain Hesiodic poems, wrote a religious book, and is called a ' Pythagorean ' ; which must mean, in this early time, before Pythagoras was born, an Orphic. Eumelus knew things about the under-world that he can only have learned from Onomacritus. Even the poem of Aristeas, which might be counted as a secular geo- graphical epos, the forerunner of the various ' Periegeses,' evidently owed its interest to its miracles and theology. The Orphic movement worked mostly among the common people and dropped out of literary record ; we only catch it where it influences philosophy. It is the explanation of Pythagoras, the man of learning and