Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/192

170 170 HISTORY OF THE beauty of the execution, yet are wanting in that which characterized the ^Eolic lyric poetry, ihe expression of vehement passion. There is little characteristic in the religious poetry of Alceeus, which consisted of hymns to different deities. These poems (judging from a few specimens of them) had so much of the epic style, and con- tained so much diffuse and graphic narrative, that their whole structure must have been different from that of the poems designed for the ex- pression of opinions and feelings. In a hymn to Apollo, Alcaeus related the beautiful Delphic legend, that the youthful god, adorned by Zeus with a golden fillet, and holding the lyre, is carried in a car drawn by swans to the pious Hyperboreans, and remains with them for a year ; when, it being the time for the Delphic tripods to sound, the god about the middle of summer goes in his car to Delphi, while choruses of youths invoke him with poems, and nightingales and cicadae salute him with their songs*. Another hymn, that to Hermes, had manifestly a close resemblance to the epic hymn of the Homeric poet t : both relate the birth of Hermes, and his driving away the oxen of Apollo, as also the wrath of the god against the thief, which however is changed into laughter, when he finds that, in the midst of his threats, Hermes has contrived to steal the quiver from his shoulder J. In another hymn the birth, of Hephaestus was related. Tt appears from a few extant fragments that Alceeus used the same metres and the same kind of strophes in the composition of these hymns, as for his other poems. The flow of the narrative must, however, have been checked by these short verses and strophes. Still Alciciis (as Horace also does sometimes) was able to carry the same ideas and the same sentence through several strophes. It is moreover probable, from the extraordinary taste displayed by the ancient poets, and by Alcaeus in particular, in the choice and manage- ment of metrical forms, that he would in his hymns have brought the verse and the subject into perfect harmony. § 5. The metrical forms used by Alcaeus are mostly light and lively ; sometimes with a softer, sometimes with a more vehement character. They consist principally of iEolic dactyls, which, though apparently resembling the dactyls of epic poetry, yet are essentially unlike. Instead of depending upon the perfect balance of the Arsis and Thesis §, they admit the shortening of the former; whence arises an irregularity which was distinguished by the ancient writers on metre by the name of disproportioned dactyls (aXoyoi ciiktvKol). These dactyls begin with the undetermined foot of two syllables, which is called basis, and they flow on lightly and swiftly, without alternating with heavy spondees. Fragm. 21. Matlh. Horace, Carm. I. 10. 9, has borrowed the last incident from Alcaeus : but the hymn of Alceeus, which related at length the story of the theft, was on the whole different from the ode of Horace, which touches on many adven- tures of Hermes, without dwelling on any. § Above ch. 4. $ 4.
 * Fragm. 17. Matth. f Above ch. 7. § 5.