Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/237

215 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GRGECE. 215 likewise enjoyed high favour at the court of Hipparchtis*. It is how- ever difficult to ascertain, from the very scanty accounts we possess of this poet, wherein consisted the point of contrast between him and his competitor. He was more peculiarly a dithyrambic poet, and was the first who introduced contests in dithyrambs at Athens t, probably in Olymp. 68. 1. b. c. 508 J- This style predominated so much in his works, that he gave to the general rhythms of his odes a dithy- rambic turn, and a free movement, in which he was aided by the variety and flexibility of tone of the flute, his favourite instrument §. He was also a theorist in his art, and investigated the laws of music (i. e. the relation of musical intervals to rapidity of movement), of which later musicians retained much. He was the instructor of Pindar in lyric poetry. It is also very possible that these studies led him to attach excessive value to art; for he was guilty of over-refinement in the rhythm and the sound of words, as, for example, in his odes written without the letter <r (a<rty^ot wlai), the hissing sound of which is en- tirely avoided as dissonant. Timocreon the Rhodian was a genius of an entirely peculiar cha- racter. Powerful both as an athlete and a poet, he transferred the pugnacity of the Palaestra to poetry. To the hate which he bore in political life to Themistocles, and, on the field of poetry, to Simonides, he owes his chief celebrity among the ancients. In an extant fragment || he bit- terly reproaches the Athenian statesman for the arbitrary manner in which he settled the affairs of the island, recalling exiles, and banishing others, of which Timocreon himself was one of the victims. He attacks his enemy with the heavy pompous measure of the Dorian mode, as with the shock of a catapulta, though on other occasions he composed in elegiac distichs and measures of the iEolic kind ; and it cannot be denied that his vituperation receives singular force from the stateliness of the expression, and the grandeur of the form. Timocreon seems to have ridiculed and parodied Simonides on account of some tricks of his art, as where Simonides expresses the same thought in the same words only trans- posed, first in an hexameter, then in a trochaic tetrameter ^[. The opposition in which we find Pindar with Simonides and Bac- chylides is of a much nobler character. For though the desire to t Schol. Aristoph. ubi sup. The statement of the Parian marble, ep. 46. appears to refer to the cyclic choruses. § Plutarch <le Mus. 39. The fragment of a hymn by Lasus to Demeter, ic Athen. xiv. p. 624 E., agrees very well with this account. % Authol. Pal. xiii. 30. Concerning this enmity, see also Diog. Laert. ii. 46, and Suidas in Ti/uoxgiwv. The citation from Simonides and Timocreon in Walz. Khet. Graec. vol. ii. p. 10. is probably connected with their quarrel.
 * Aristoph. Vesp. 1410. comp. Herod, viii. 6.
 * Plutarch. Themist. 21.