Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/135

113 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 113 elegiac poetry. Henceforward this union often appears : the same poet who employs the elegy to express his joyous and melancholy emotions, has recourse to the iambus where his cool sense prompts him to censure the follies of mankind. This relation of the two metres in question is perceptible in the two earliest iambic poets, Archilociius and Simo- NiDtfS of Amorgus. The elegies of Archilociius (of which considerable fragments are extant, while of Simonides we only know that he com- posed elegies) had nothing of that bitter spirit of which his iambics were full, but they contain the frank expression of a mind powerfully affected by outward circumstances. Probably these circumstances were in great part connected with the migration of Archilochus from Paros to Thasos, which by no means fulfilled his expectations, as his iambics show. Nor are his elegies quite wanting in the warlike spirit of Callinus. Archi- lochus calls himself the servant of the God of War and the disciple of the Muses*; and praises the mode of fighting of the brave Abantes in Eubcea, who engaged man to man with spear and sword, and not from afar with arrows and slings ; perhaps, from its contrast with the prac- tice of their Thracian neighbours who, perhaps, greatly annoyed the colo- nists in Thasos by their wild and tumultuary mode of warfaref. But on the other hand, Archilochus avows, without much sense of shame, and with an indifference which first throws a light on this part of the Ionic character, that one of the Saians (a Thracian tribe, with whom the Thasians were often at war) may pride himself in his shield, which he had left behind him in some bushes; he has saved his life, and will get a shield quite as good some other timej. Iu other fragments, Archilo- chus seeks to banish the recollections of his misfortunes by an appeal to steady patience, and by the conviction that all men are equal sufferers ; and praises wine as the best antidote to care§. It was evidently very natural that from the custom already noticed among the Spartans, of singing elegies after drinking parties (avpTroana), there should arise a connexion between the subject of the poem and the occasion on which it was sung ; and thus wine and the pleasures of the feast became the sub- ject of the elegy. Symposiac elegies of this kind were, at least in later times, after the Persian war, also sung at Sparta, in which, with all respect for the gods and heroes, the guests were invited to drinking and merriment, to the dance and the song; and, in the genuine Spartan feeling, the man was congratulated who had a fair wife at home. || A mong Ktt) Movffiav ipccTOi ocvgov ivrwrufttvos. f Gaisford, Poet.Gr. Mm. frag. 4. J 11). frag. 3. § Frag. 1, v. 5; and frag. 7. which Athen xi. p. 403, has preserved five distichs, was sung in Spaita or in the Spartan camp : and moreover, at the royal table (called by Xenoj hon the lapoiria). Tor Spai+ans alone could have been exhorted to make libations to Hercules, to Aic- mene, to Procles. and to the Perseids. The reason why Procles alone is mentioned, ■without Furysthenes, (the other ancestor of the kings of Sparta.) can only be thattho king saluted in the poem (^«/ji7a fifivigts fattrtXilif irarrg te tuty./) ti) was a Proclid, —that is, from the date, probably, Archilamus. I
 * Ei/ti 5' yoi h/ia-ruv fiiv'Evva.Xioiti civaxros
 * It is clear that the eleiiy of Ion of Chios, the contemporary of Pericles, of