Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/207

185 justice), considered the drunkenness of Anacreon as rather poetical than real. In Anacreon we see plainly how the spirit of the Ionic race, notwithstanding the elegance and refinement of Ionian manners, had lost its energy, its warmth of moral feeling, and its power of serious re- flexion, and was reduced to a light play of pleasing thoughts and senti- ments. So far as we are able to judge of the poetry of Anacreon, it seems to have had the same character as that attributed by Aristotle to the later Ionic school of painting of Zeuxis, that " it had elegance of design and brilliancy of colouring, but was wanting in moral character

§ 14. The Ionic softness, and departure from strict rule, which cha- racterizes the poetry of Anacreon, may also be perceived in his versifi- cation. His language approached much nearer to the style of common conversation than that of the Æolic lyric poets, so as frequently to seem like prose embellished with ornamental epithets ; and his rhythm is also softer and less bounding than that of the Æolians, and has an easy and graceful negligence, which Horace has endeavoured to imitate. Some- times he makes use of logacedic metres, as in the Glyconean verses, which he combines into strophes, by subjoining a Pherecratean verse to a number of Glyconeans. In this metre he shows his love for variety and novelty, by mixing strophes of different lengths with several Glyconean verses, yet so as to preserve a certain symmetry in the whole *. Anacreon also, like the Æolic lyric poets, sometimes used long choriambic verses, particularly when he intended to express energy of feeling, as in the poem against Artemon, already mentioned. This metre also exhibits a peculiarity in the rhythm of the Ionic poets, viz., an alternation of dif- ferent metres, producing a freer and more varied, but also a more care- less, flow of the rhythm. In the present poem this peculiarity consists in the alternation of choriambics with iambic dipodies †. The same cha- racter is still more strongly shown in the Ionic metre (Ionici a minori) which was much used by Anacreon. At the same time he changed its expression (probably after the example of the musician Olympus) ‡, by

[*] So in the long fragment in Schol. Hepheest. p. 125. fr. 1. Bergk.

This is followed by a second strophe, with four glyconeans and a pherecratean ; and both strophes together form a larger whole. This hymn of Anacreon, the only composition of its kind which is known, is evidently intended for the inhabitants of Magnesia, on the Majander and Lethanis. rebuilt after its destruction (ch. 9. § 4.), where Artemis was worshipped under the title of Leucophryne.

[†] So that the metre is

Two such verses as these are then followed by an iambic dimeter, as an epode:

[‡] See ch. 12 §7.