Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/127

105 LITERATURE OK ANCIENT GREECE. 105 ance to its lament for the lost, its longing after the absent, its care for the present, in appropriate forms of poetical composition. These feel- ings were still without the elevation which the beauty of art can alone confer. The epopee kept the mind fixed in the contemplation of a former generation of heroes, which it could view with sympathy and in- terest, but not with passionate emotion. And although in the econo- mical poem of Hesiod the cares and sufferings of the present time fur- nished the occasion for an epic work, yet this was only a partial descent from the lofty career of epic poetry ; for it immediately rose again from this lowly region, and taking a survey of things affecting not only the entire Greek nation but the whole of mankind, celebrated in solemn strains the order of the universe and of social life, as approved by the Gods. This exclusive prevalence of epic poetry was also doubtless connected with the political state of Greece at this time. It has been already re- marked* how acceptable the ordinary subjects of the epic poems must have been to the princes who derived their race from the heroes of the mythical age, as was the case with all the royal families of early times. This rule of hereditary princes was the prevailing form of government in Greece, at least up to the beginning of the Olympiads, and from this period it gradually disappeared ; at an earlier date and by more vio- lent revolutions among the Ionians, than among the nations of Pelopon- nesus. The republican movements, by which the princely families were deprived of their privileges, could not be otherwise than favourable to a free expression of the feelings, and in general to a stronger development of each man's individuality. Hence the poet, who, in the most perfect form of the epos, was completely lost in his subject, and was only the mirror in which the grand and brilliant images of the past were reflected, now comes before the people as a man with thoughts and objects of his own ; and gives a free vent to the struggling emotions of his soul in elegiac and iambic strains. As the elegy and the iambus, those two contemporary and cognate species of poetry, originated with Ionic poets, and (as far as we are aware) with citizens of free states; so, again, the remains and accounts of these styles of poetry furnish the best image of the internal condition of the Ionic states of Asia Minor and the Islands in the first period of their republican constitution. § 2. The word clegeioti, as used by the best writers, like the word epos, refers not to the subject of a poem, but simply to its form. In general the Greeks, in dividing their poetry into classes, looked almost exclusively to its metrical shape ; but in considering the essence of the Greek poetry we shall not be compelled to depart from these divisions, as the Greek poets always chose their verse with the nicest attention to the feelings to be conveyed by the poem. The perfect harmony, the accurate correspondence of expression between these multifarious me-
 * Chap.iv. § 1, 2.