Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 11.djvu/150

Rh The epic poetry of Ionia celebrated the great deeds of heroes in the old wars. But in Greece proper there arose another school of epos, which busied itself with religious lore and ethical precepts, especially in relation to the rural life of Boeotia. This school is represented by the name of Hesiod. The legend spoke of him as vanquishing Homer in a poetical contest at Chalcis in Euboaa ; and it expresses the fact that, to the old Greek uiiiid, these two names stood for two contrasted epic types. Nothing is certainly known of his date, except that it must have been subsequent to the maturity of Ionian epos. He is conjecturally placed about 850-800 B.C. ; but some would refer him to the early part of the 7th century B.C. His home was at Ascra, a village iu a valley under Helicon, whither his father had migrated from Cyme in yEolis on the coast of Asia Minor. In Hesiod s Works and Days we have the earliest example of a didactic poem. The seasons and the labours of the Boeotian farmer s year are followed by a list of the days which are lucky or unlucky for work. The Theogony, or &quot; Origin of the Gods,&quot; describes first how the visible order of nature arose out of chaos ; next, how the gods were born. Though it never possessed the character of a sacred book, it remained a standard authority on the genealogies of the gods. So far as a corrupt and confused text warrants a judgment, the poet was piecing together not always in telligently- the fragments of a very old cosmogonic system, using for this purpose both the hymns preserved in the temples and the myths which lived in folklore. The epic lay in 480 lines called the Shield of Heracles partly imi tated from the 18th book of the Iliad is the work of an author or authors later than Hesiod. In the Hesiodic poetry, as represented by the Works and Days and the Theogony, we see the influence of the temple at Delphi. Hesiod recognizes the existence of daimones spirits of the departed who haunt the earth as the invisible guardians of j ustice ; and he connects the office of the poet with that of the prophet. The poet is one whom the gods have authorized to impress doctrine and practical duties on men. A religious purpose was essentially characteristic of the Hesiodic school. Its poets treated the old legends as relics of a sacred history, and not merely, in the Ionian manner, as subjects of ideal izing art. Such titles as the Maxims of Cheiron and the Lay of Melampus, the seer lost poems of the Hesiodic school illustrate its ethical and its mystic tendencies.

The Homeric Hymns form a collection of thirty-three pieces, some of them very short, in hexameter verse. Their traditional title is Hymns or Preludes of Homer and the Homerida). The second of the alternative designations is the true one. The pieces are not &quot; hymns &quot; used in formal worship, but &quot; preludes &quot; or prefatory addresses (irpoot/ua) with which the rhapsodists ushered in their recitations of epic poetry. The &quot; prelude &quot; might be addressed to the presiding god of the festival, or to any local deity whom the reciter wished to honour. The pieces range in date perhaps from 750 to 500 B.C., and it is probable that the collection was formed in Attica, for the use of rhapsodists. The style is that of the Ionian or Homeric epos ; but there are also several traces of the Hesiodic or Boeotian school. The five principal &quot;hymns &quot;are those (1) to the Delian Apollo, i. 1-177; (2) to the Pythian Apollo, i. 178 to end; (3) to Hermes, ii. ; (4) to Aphrodite, iii. ; and (5) to Demeter, v. The hymn to the Delian Apollo, quoted by Thucydides (iii. 104) as Homer s, is of peculiar interest on account of the lines describing the Ionian festival at Delos. Two celebrated pieces of a sportive kind passed under Homer s name. The Margites a comic poem on one &quot; who knew many things but knew them all badly &quot; is regarded by Aristotle as the earliest germ of comedy, and was possibly as old as 700 B.C. Only a few lines remain. Tlie Battle of the Frogs and Mice probably belongs to the decline of Greek literature, perhaps to the 2d century B.C. About 300 verses of it are extant.

In the Iliad and the Odyssey the personal opinions or sympathies of the poet may sometimes be conjectured, but they are not declared, or even hinted. Hesiod, indeed, sometimes gives us a glimpse of his own troubles or views. Yet Hesiod is, on the whole, essentially a prophet. The message which he delivers is not from himself ; the truths which he imparts have not been discovered by his own search. He is the mouthpiece of the Delphian Apollo. Personal opinion and feeling may tinge his utterance, but they do not deter mine its general complexion. The egotism is a single thread ; it is not the basis of the texture. Epic poetiy was in Greece the foundation of all other poetry; for many centuries no other kind was generally cultivated, no other could speak to the whole people. Politically, the age was monarchical or aristocratic; intellectually, it was too simple for the analysis of thought or emotion. Kings and princes loved to hear of the great deeds of their ancestors; common men loved to hear of them too, for they had no other interest. The mind of Greece found no subject of contem plation so attractive as the warlike past of the race, or so useful as that lore which experience and tradition had be queathed. But in the course of the 8th century B.C. the rule of hereditary princes began to disappear. Monarchy gave place to oligarchy, and this often after the inter mediate phase of a tyranny to democracy. Sueh a change was necessarily favourable to the growth of reflection. The private citizen is no longer a mere cipher, the Homeric TIS, a unit in the dim multitude of the king-ruled folk ; he gains more power of independent action, his mental horizon is widened, his life becomes fuller and more interesting. He begins to feel the need of expressing the thoughts and feel ings that are stirred in him. But as yet a prose literature does not exist ; the new thoughts, like the old heroic stories, must still be told in verse. The forms of verse created by this need were the Elegiac and the Iambic.

The elegiac metre is, in form, a simple variation on the epic metre, obtained by docking the second of two hexameters so as to make it a verse of five feet or measures. But the poetical capabilities of the elegiac couplet are of a wholly different kind from those of heroic verse. Elegos seems to be the Greek form of a name given by the Carians and Lydians to a lament for the dead. This was accompanied by the soft music of the Lydian flute, which continued to be associated with Greek elegy. The non- Hellenic origin of elegy is indicated by this very fact. The flute was to the Greeks au Asiatic instrument, string instruments were those which they made their own, and it would hardly have been wedded by them to a species of poetry which had arisen among themselves. The early elegiac poetry of Greece was by no means confined to mourn ing for the dead. War, love, politics, proverbial philosophy, were in turn its themes ; it dealt, in fact, with the chief interest of the poet and his friends, whatever that might be at the time. It is the direct expression of the poet s own thoughts, addressed to a sympathizing society. This is its first characteristic. The second is that, even when most pathetic or most spirited, it still preserves, on the whole, the tone of conversation or of narrative. Greek elegy stops short of lyric passion. English elegy, whether funereal as in Dryden and Pope, or reflective as in Gray, is usually true to the same normal type. Roman elegy is not equally true to it, but sometimes tends to trench on the lyric province. For Roman elegy is mainly amatory or sentimental ; and its masters imitated, as a rule, not the early Greek elegists, not Tyrtajus or Theognis, but the later Alexandrian elegists, such as Callimachus or Philetas. Catullus introduced the metre to Latin literature, and used it with more fidelity than his followers to its genuine Greek inspiration.