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  Atticorum per Platonis de legibus libros indagandis (Marburg, 1836); Staatsaltertümer, ed. 6, Thumser (Freiburg, 1892); Rechtsaltertümer, ed. 3, Thalheim (Freiburg, 1884); G. Busolt, Staats- und Rechtsaltertümer, ed. 2 (Munich, 1892); U. von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff, Aristoteles und Athen (Berlin, 1893); G. Gilbert, ''Gk. Constitutional Antiquities'' (vol. i., Eng. trans., pp. 376-416, London, 1895); J. H. Lipsius, (1) new ed. of Meier and Schömann, Der attische Process (Berlin, 1883–1887); (2) ed. 4 of Schömann, ''Gr. Altertümer (Berlin, 1897–1902); (3) Das attische Recht und Rechtsverfahren (Leipzig, 1905); Daremberg and Saglio, Dictionnaire des antiquités (Paris, 1877); G. Glotz, La Solidarité de la famille dans le droit criminel en Grèce (Paris, 1904); L. Beauchet, Droit privé de la rép. athén''. (4 vols., Paris, 1897); C. R. Kennedy, ''Appendices to transl. of Dem''. vols. iii. and iv. (1856–1861); Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, ed. 3 (1891); F. B. Jevons, in Gardner and Jevons, Greek Antiquities (1895, pp. 526-597); W. Wyse, in Whibley’s Companion to Greek Studies (Cambridge, 1905), pp. 377-402.

 GREEK LITERATURE.—The literature of the Greek language is broadly divisible into three main sections: (1) Ancient, (2) Byzantine, (3) Modern. These are dealt with below in that order.

The ancient literature falls into three periods: (A) The Early Literature, to about 475 ; epic, elegiac, iambic and lyric poetry; the beginnings of literary prose. (B) The Attic Literature 475–300 ; tragic and comic drama; historical, oratorical and philosophical prose. (C) The Literature of the Decadence, 300 to  529; which may again be divided into the Alexandrian period, 300–146, and the Graeco-Roman period, 146  to  529.

For details regarding particular works or the lives of their authors reference should be made to the separate articles devoted to the principal Greek writers. The object of the following pages is to sketch the literary development as a whole, to show how its successive periods were related to each other, and to mark the dominant characteristics of each.

(A) The Early Literature.—A process of natural growth may be traced through all the best work of the Greek genius. The Greeks were not literary imitators of foreign models; the forms of poetry and prose in which they attained to such unequalled excellence were first developed by themselves. Their literature had its roots in their political and social life; it is the spontaneous expression of that life in youth, maturity and decay; and the order in which its several fruits are produced is not the result of accident or caprice. Further, the old Greek literature has a striking completeness, due to the fact that each great branch of the Hellenic race bore a characteristic part in its development. Ionians, Aeolians, Dorians, in turn contributed their share. Each dialect corresponded to a certain aspect of Hellenic life and character. Each found its appropriate work.

The Ionians on the coast of Asia Minor—a lively and genial people, delighting in adventure, and keenly sensitive to everything bright and joyous—created artistic epic poetry out of the lays in which Aeolic minstrels sang of the old Achaean wars. And among the Ionians arose elegiac poetry, the first variation on the epic type. These found a fitting instrument in the harmonious Ionic dialect, the flexible utterance of a quick and versatile intelligence. The Aeolians of Lesbos next created the lyric of personal passion, in which the traits of their race—its chivalrous pride, its bold but sensuous fancy—found a fitting voice in the fiery strength and tenderness of Aeolic speech. The Dorians of the Peloponnesus, Sicily and Magna Graecia then perfected the choral lyric for festivals and religious worship; and here again an earnest faith, a strong pride in Dorian usage and renown had an apt interpreter in the massive and sonorous Doric. Finally, the Attic branch of the Ionian stock produced the drama, blending elements of all the other kinds, and developed an artistic literary prose in history, oratory and philosophy. It is in the Attic literature that the Greek mind receives its most complete interpretation.

A natural affinity was felt to exist between each dialect and that species of composition for which it had been specially used. Hence the dialect of the Ionian epic poets would be adopted with more or less thoroughness even by epic or elegiac poets who were not Ionians. Thus the Aeolian Hesiod uses it in epos, the Dorian Theognis in elegy, though not without alloy. Similarly, the Dorian Theocritus wrote love-songs in Aeolic. All the faculties and tones of the language were thus gradually brought out by the co-operation of the dialects. Old Greek literature has an essential unity—the unity of a living organism; and this unity comprehends a number of distinct types, each of which is complete in its own kind.

Extant Greek literature begins with the Homeric poems. These are works of art which imply a long period of antecedent poetical cultivation. Of the pre-Homeric poetry we have no remains, and very little knowledge. Such glimpses as we get of it connect it with two different stages in the religion of the prehistoric Hellenes. The first of these stages is that in which the agencies or forms of external nature were personified indeed, yet with the consciousness that the personal names were only symbols. Some very ancient Greek songs of which mention is made may have belonged to this stage—as the songs of Linus, Ialemus and Hylas. Linus, the fair youth killed by dogs, seems to be the spring passing away before Sirius. Such songs have been aptly called “songs of the seasons.” The second stage is that in which the Hellenes have now definitively personified the powers which they worship. Apollo, Demeter, Dionysus, Cybele, have now become to them beings with clearly conceived attributes. To this second stage belong the hymns connected with the names of the legendary bards, such as Orpheus, Musaeus, Eumolpus, who are themselves associated with the worship of the Pierian Muses and the Attic ritual of Demeter. The seats of this early sacred poetry are not only “Thracian”—i.e. on the borders of northern Greece—but also “Phrygian” and “Cretan.” It belongs, that is, presumably to an age when the ancestors of the Hellenes had left the Indo-European home in central Asia, but had not yet taken full possession of the lands which were afterwards Hellenic. Some of their tribes were still in Asia; others were settling in the islands of the Aegean; others were passing through the lands on its northern seaboard. If there was a period when the Greeks possessed no poetry but hymns forming part of a religious ritual, it may be conjectured that it was not of long duration. Already in the Iliad a secular character belongs to the marriage hymn and to the dirge for the dead, which in ancient India were chanted by the priest. The bent of the Greeks was to claim poetry and music as public joys; they would not long have suffered them to remain sacerdotal mysteries. And among the earliest themes on which the lay artist in poetry was employed were probably war-ballads, sung by minstrels in the houses of the chiefs whose ancestors they celebrated.

Such war-ballads were the materials from which the earliest epic poetry of Greece was constructed. By an “epic” poem the Greeks meant a narrative of heroic action in hexameter verse. The term  meant at first simply “verses”; it acquired its special meaning only when , lyric songs set to music, came to be distinguished from  , verses not set to music, but merely recited. Epic poetry is the only kind of extant Greek poetry which is older than about 700 The early epos of Greece is represented by the Iliad and the Odyssey, Hesiod and the Homeric hymns; also by some fragments of the “Cyclic” poets.

After the Dorian conquest of the Peloponnesus, the Aeolian emigrants who settled in the north-west of Asia Minor brought with them the warlike legends of their chiefs, the Achaean princes of old. These legends lived in the ballads of the Aeolic minstrels, and from them passed southward into Ionia, where the Ionian poets gradually shaped them into higher artistic forms. Among the seven places which claimed to be the birthplace of Homer, that which has the best title is Smyrna. Homer himself is called “son of Meles”—the stream which flowed through old Smyrna, on the border between Aeolia and Ionia. The tradition is significant in regard to the origin and character of the Iliad, for in the Iliad we have Achaean ballads worked up by Ionian art. A preponderance