Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/225

203 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GKEECE. 203 sympathised. This legend was current in the native country of Stesi- chorus, near the river Himeras, where Daphnis is said to have uttered his laments ; and near Cephaloedium, where a stone resembling a man's form was said to have once been Daphnis. Himera was the only one among the ancient Greek colonies in Sicily, which lay on the northern coast of the island; it was entirely surrounded by the aboriginal inha- bitants, the Siculians ; and it is therefore probable that the hero Daphnis, and the original form of the pastoral song, belonged to the Siculian peasantry *. From what precedes, it appears that the poetry of Stesichorus was not employed in expressing his own feelings, or describing the events of his own life, but that he preferred the past to the present. This cha- racter seems to have been common to all the poems of Stesichorus. Thus he did not, like Sappho, compose Epithalamia having an imme- diate reference to the present, but he took some of his materials from mythology. The beautiful Epithalamium of Theocritus f, supposed to have been sung by the Laconian virgins before the chamber of Mene- laus and Helen, is, in part, imitated from a poem of Stesichorus. § 7. Thus much for the peculiarities of this choral poet, not less re- markable in himself, than as a precursor of the perfect lyric poetry of Pindar. Our information respecting Arion is far less complete and satisfactory; yet the little that we know of him proves the wide exten- sion of lyric poetry in the time of Alcman and Stesichorus. Arion was the contemporary of Stesichorus; he is called the disciple of Alcman, and (according to the testimony of Herodotus) flourished during the reign of Periander at Corinth, between Olymp. 3S. 1. and 48. 4. (628 and 585 b. c), probably nearer the end than the beginning of this period. He was a native of Methymna in Lesbos; a district in which the worship of Bacchus, introduced by the Boeotians, was celebrated with orgiastic rites, and with music. Arion was chiefly known in Greece as the perfecter of the dithyramb. The dithyramb, as a song of Bacchanalian festivals, is doubtless of great antiquity ; its name is too obscure to have arisen at a late period of the Greek language, and probably originated in the earliest times of the worship of Bacchus J. Its character was always, like that of the worship to which it belonged, impassioned and enthusiastic; the extremes of feeling, rapturous plea- sure, and wild lamentation, were both expressed in it. Concerning the mode of its representation we are but imperfectly informed. Archilo- chus says, that " he is able, when his mind is inflamed with wine, to Stesichorus. not as it is expanded in Theocrit. Id. I., but as it is touched upon in Id. VII. 73. The pastoral legend of the Goathead Comatas, who was inclosed in a box by the king's command, and led by a swarm of bees, sent by the Muses (Theocrit VII. 78. s'j.) has all the appearance of a story embellished by Stesichorus. f Id. XVIII. f Un the formation of ^Jja^/So;, see p. 133 note *.
 * It appears from /Elian V. H., X. 18. that the legend of Daphnis was given in