Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/150

128 128 HISTORY OF THE the Athenians had set up in a grotto under their acropolis, because the Arcadian °-od had, according to the popular belief, assisted them at Marathon. " Miltiades set up me, the cloven-footed Pan, the Arca- dian who took part against the Medians, and with the Athenians." But Simonides sometimes condescended to express sentiments which he could not have shared, as in the inscription on the tripod consecrated at Delphi, which the Greeks afterwards caused to be erased : " Pausanias, the commander of the Greeks, having destroyed the army of the Medes, dedicated this monument to Phoebus*." These verses express the arro- gance of the Spartan general, which the good sense and moderation of the poet would never have approved. The form of nearly all these epi- grams of Simonides is the elegiac. Simonides usually adhered to it except when a name (on account of a short between two long syllables) could not be adapted to the dactylic metref ; in which cases he employed trochaic measures. The character of the language, and especially the dialect, also remained on the whole true to the elegiac type, except that in inscriptions for monuments designed for Doric tribes, traces of the Doric dialect sometimes occur. CHAPTER XL § 1. Striking contrast of the Iambic and other contemporaneous Poetry. — § 2. Poetry in reference to the bad and the vulgar. — § 3. Different treatment of it in Homer and Hesiod. — § 4. Homeric Comic Poems, Margites, &c. — § 5. Scuni- lous songs at meals, at the worship of Demeter ; the Festival of Demeier o aros the cradle of the Iambic poetry of Archilochus. — § 6. Date and Public Life of Archilochus. — § 7. His Private Life ; subject of his Iambics. — § S. Metrical form of his iambic and trochaic verses, and different application of the two asynartetes; epodes. — § 9. Inventions and innovations in the musical recitation. — § 10. In- novations in Language. — § 11. Simonides of Amorgus ; his Satirical Poem against Women. — § 12. Solon's iambics and trochaics. — § 13. Iambic Poems of Hipjio- nax; invention of eholiambics ; Ananias. — § 14. The Fable; its application among the Greeks, especially in Iambic poetry. — § 15. Kinds of the Fable, named after different races and cities. — § 16. ^Esop, his Life, and the Character of his Fables. — § 17. Parody, burlesques in an epic form, by Hipponax. — § 18. Batta- chomyomachia. § 1. The kind of poetry distinguished among the ancients by the name Iambic, was created by the Parian poet Archilochus, at the same time as the elegy. In entering on the consideration of this sort of poetry, and in endeavouring by the same process as we have heretofore em- ployed to trace its origin to the character of the Grecian people, and to estimate its poetical and moral value, we are met at the first glance by facts more difficult, and apparently more impossible of comprehension, than any we have hitherto encountered. At a time when the Greeks r r. 40. f As 'Ap%ivauTtit, 'Ikwovixiij.