Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/110

 92 HISTORY OF GKIECK. considerable poem extant is devoted to a survey of the cbarao ters of women, in iambic verse, and by way of comparison with various animals, the mare, the ass, the bee, etc. It follows out the Hesiodic vein respecting the social and economical mis- chief usually caused by women, with some few honorable excep- tions ; but the poet shows a much larger range of observation and illustration, if we compare him with his predecessor Hesiod ; moreover, his illustrations come fresh from life and reality. We find in this early iambist the same sympathy with industry and its due rewards which are observable in Hesiod, together with a still more melancholy sense of the uncertainty of human events. Of Solon and Theognis I have spoken in former chapters. They reproduce in part the moralizing vein of Simonides, though with a strong admixture of personal feeling and a direct applica- tion to passing events. The mixture of political with social morality, which we find in both, marks their more advanced age : Solon beai-s in this respect the same relation to Simonides, as his contemporary Alkaeus bears to Archilochus. His poems, as far as we can judge by the fragments remaining, appear to have been short occasional effusions, with the exception of the epic poem respecting the submerged island of Atlantis ; which he began towards the close of his life, but never finished. They are elegiac, trimeter iambic, and trochaic tetrameter : in his hands certainly neither of these metres can be said to have any special or separate character. If the poems of Solon are short, those of Theognis are much shorter, and are indeed so much broken (as they stand in our present collection), as to read like separate epigrams or bursts of feeling, which the poet had not taken the trouble to incorporate in any definite scheme or series. They form a singular mixture of maxim and passion, of gen- eral precept with personal affection towards the youth Kyrnue, which surprises us if tried by the standard of literary compo- sition, but which seems a very genuine manifestation of an im- poverished exile's complaints and restlessness. What remains to us of Phokylides, another of the gnomic poets nearly contempo- rary with Solon, is nothing more than a few maxims in verse, couplets, with the name of the author in several cases embodied in them. Amidst all the variety of rhythmical and metrical innovations