Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/220

198 198 HISTORY OF THE cessor to the Laconiati poet, in his endeavours to bring' that branch of poetry to perfection. We must consider him as starting- from the same point, but led by the originality of his genius into a totally different path. Stesichorus is of rather a later date than Alcman. He was born, indeed, just at the period when the first steps towards the development of lyric poetry were made by Terpander (Olympiad 33. 4. 643 b. c. ; according to others, Olympiad 37. b. c. 632), but his life was protracted above eighty years (to Olympiad 55. 1. 560 b. c. ; according to others 56. b. c. 556) ; so that he might be a contemporary of the Agrigentine tyrant Phalaris, against whose ambi- tious projects he is said by Aristotle to have warned his fellow-citizens in an ingenious fable *. According; to common tradition, Stesichorus was a native of Himera, a city containing a mixed population, half Ionic, half Doric, the Himeraeans having come partly from the Chalci- dian colony Zancle, partly from Syracuse. But at the time Stesichorus was born, Himera was but just founded, and his family could have been settled there but a few years. His ancestors, however, were nei- ther Zanclaeans nor Syracusans, but dwelt at Mataurus, or Metaurus, a city on the south of Italy, founded by the Locrians f. This circum- stance throws a very welcome light on the otherwise strange tradition, which Aristotle thought worthy of recording, that Stesichorus was a son of Hesiod, by a virgin named Ctimene, of O3neon, a place in the country of the Ozolian Locrians. If we abstract from this what belongs to the ancient mode of expression, which generally clothes in the simplest forms all relationships of blood, the following will result from the first mentioned facts. There was, as we saw above §, a line of epic bards in the style of Hesiod, who inhabited QCneon, and the neighbouring Nau- pactus, in the country of the Locrians. A family in which a similar practice of the poetical art was hereditary came through the colony of Locri in Italy, in which the Ozolian Locrians took peculiar interest, to these parts, and settled in Mataurus. From this family sprang Stesi- chorus. Stesichorus lived at a time when the serene tone of the epos and an exclusive devotion to a mythical subject no longer sufficed ; the predo- minant tendency of the Greek mind was towards lyric poetry. He himself was powerfully affected by this taste, and consecrated his life to the transplantation of all the rich materials, and the mighty and imposing shapes, which had hitherto been the exclusive property of the epos, to the choral poem. His special business was the training and direction of choruses, and he assumed the name of Stesichorus, or leader of choruses, his original name being Tisias. This occupation must have f Steph. Byz. in Mera^f, SrW^ajaj, Maraotfyos yivos. See Klein, Fragments Stesichori, p. 9. J In Proclus and ^tetzes, Prolog, to Hesiod. $ Ch. 8. § 4.
 * Above, ch. xi. § 14.