Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/40

18 18 HISTORY OK THE religions of Greece and Asia Minor ; boys of extraordinary beauty, and in the flower of youth, who are supposed to have been drowned, or de- voured by raging dogs, or destroyed by wild beasts, and whose death is lamented in the harvest or other periods of the hot season. It is obvious that these cannot have been real persons, whose death excited so general a sympathy, although the fables which were offered in explanation of these customs often speak of youths of royal blood, who were carried off in the prime of their life. The real object of lamentation was the tender beauty of spring destroyed by the summer heat, and other phenomena of the same kind, which the imagination of these early times invested with a personal form, and represented as gods or beings of a divine nature. According to the very remarkable and explicit tradition of the Argives, Linus was a youth, who, having sprung from a divine origin, grew up with the shepherds among the lambs, and was torn in pieces by wild dogs ; whence arose the " festival of the lambs," at which many dogs were slain. Doubtless this festival was celebrated during the greatest heat, at the time of the constellation Sirius ; the emblem of which, among the Greeks, was, from the earliest times, a raging dog. It was a natural confusion of the tradition that Linus should afterwards become a minstrel, one of the earliest bards of Greece, who begins a contest with Apollo himself, and overcomes Hercules in playing on the cithara ; even, however, in this character Linus meets his death, and we must probably assume that his fate was mentioned in the ancient song. In Homer the Linus is represented as sung by a boy, who plays at the same time on the harp, an accompaniment usually mentioned with this song ; the young men and women who bear the grapes from the vineyard follow him, moving onward with a measured step, and uttering a shrill cry*, in which probably the chief stress was laid on the excla- mation at ive. That this shrill cry (called by Homer Ivyfiog) was not necessarily a joyful strain will be admitted by any one who has heard the Ivynac of the Swiss peasants, with its sad and plaintive notes, resounding from hill to hill. § 3. Plaintive songs of this kind, in which not the misfortunes of a single individual, but an universal and perpetually recurring cause of grief was expressed, abounded in ancient Greece, and especially in Asia Minor, the inhabitants of which country had a peculiar fondness for mournful tunes. The lalemas seems to have been nearly identical with the Linus, as, to a certain extent, the same mythological narrations are applied to both. At Tegea, in Arcadia, there was a plaintive song, called Sccphrus, which appears, from the fabulous relation in Pausaniasf, iftt^eii/ xituetl^i. Alvtjv o iro ku.Xov audi Xe*TT«Xs*j (ptuvr' to) o lr l ffo'ovTi^ uuxgrn /Aokrrri r wyu.w rt. rroo-) ffxa't^ovris iwovto. — Iliad, xviii. 569—572, on the meaning of po<rn in this passage, see below, § 6. t viii. 53, 2.
 * TOitrtv o tv fiifftrowi irai; (p'o^iyyi Xiyi'r/i,