Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/108

 90 HISTORY OF GREECE. career to musical composers just at the time when Sparta to be closed against musical novelties. Alkaeus and Sappho, both natives of Lesbos, appear about con- temporaries with Arion, B.C. 610-580. Of their once celebrated lyric compositions, scarcely anything remains. But the criti- cisms which are preserved on both of them place them in strong contrast with Alkman, who lived and composed under the more restrictive atmosphere of Sparta, and in considerable analogy with the turbulent vehemence of Archilochus, 1 though without his intense private malignity. Both composed for their own lo- cal audience, and in their own Lesbian JEolic dialect ; not be- cause there was any peculiar fitness in that dialect to express their vein of sentiment, but because it was more familiar to their hearers. Sappho herself boasts of the preeminence of the Les- bian bards ; a and the celebrity of Terpander, Perikleitas, and Arion, permits us to suppose that there may have been before her many popular bards in the island who did not attain to Hel- lenic celebrity. Alkaeus included in his songs the fiercest bursts of political feeling, the stirring alternations of war and exile, and all the ardent relish of a susceptible man for wine and love. 3 The love-song seems to have formed the principal theme of Sap- pho, who, however, also composed odes or songs 4 on a great vari- Simonides of Keos (Frag. 19, ed. Bergk) puts Homer and Stesichorus together : see the epigram of Antipater in the Anthologia, t. i, p. 328, ed Ja- cobs, and Dio Chrysostom, Or. 55, vol. ii, p. 284, Rcisk. Compare Kleine, Stesichori Fragment, pp. 30-34 (Berlin 1828), and 0. Miiller. History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, ch. xiv, sect. 5. The musical composers of Argos are affirmed by Herodotus to have been the most renowned in Greece, half a century after Sakadas (Her. iii, 131). 1 Horat. Epistol. i, 19, 23. 2 Sappho, Fragm. 93, ed. Bergk. See also Plehn, Lesbiaca, pp. 145-165- Respecting the poetesses, two or three of whom were noted, contemporary with Sappho, see Ulrici, Gesch. der Hellen. Poesie, vol. ii, p. 370. 3 Dionys. Hal. Ant. Rom. v, 82 ; Horat. Od. i, 32, ii, 13 ; Cicero, De Nat. Door, i 23 ; the striking passage in Plutarch, Symposion iii, 1, 3, ap. Bergk. Fr igm t2. In the view of Dionysius, the JEolic dialect of Alkceus and Sapph : diminished the value of their compositions : the ^Eolic accent, analogous to the Latin, and acknowledging scarcely any oxyton words, Eaust have rendered them much less agreeable in recitation or song. See Plutarch, De Music, p. 1136 ; Dionys. Hal. de Comp. Verb, c 23,