Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/41

19 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 1 9 to have been sung at the time of the summer heat. In Phrygia, a melancholy song, called Lityerses, was sung at the cutting of the corn. At the same season of the year, the Mariandynians, on the. shores of the Black Sea, played the mournful ditty Bormus on the native flute. The subject of their lamentation may be easity conjectured from the story that Bormus was a beautiful boy, who, having gone' to fetch water for the reapers in the heat of the day, was, while drawing it, borne down by the nymphs of the stream. Of similar meaning are the cries for the youth Hylas, swallowed up by the waters of the fountain, which, in the neighbouring country of the Bithynians, re-echoed from mountain to mountain. In the southern parts of Asia Minor we find, in connexion with the Syrian worship, a similar lament for Adonis*, whose untimely death was celebrated by Sappho, together with Linus ; and the Mancrox, a song current in Egypt, especially at Pelusium, in which likewise a youth, the only son of a king, who died in early youth, was bewailed ; a resemblance sufficiently strong to induce Herodotus -ft w'ho is always ready to find a connexion between Greece and Egypt, to consider the M micros and the Linus as the same song |. § 4. A very different class of feelings is expressed in another kind of songs, which originally were dedicated only to Apollo, and were closely connected with the ideas relating to the attributes and actions of this god, viz. the p<zam (jraujoveq in Homer). The paeans were songs, of which the tune and words expressed courage and confidence. " All sounds of lamentation" (aiXiva), says Callimachus, " cease when the Ie Paean, Ie Paean, is heard §." As with the Linus the interjection at, so with the Paean the cry of h) was connected; exclamations, un- meaning in themselves, but made expressive by the tone with which they were uttered, and which, as has been already mentioned, dated back from the earliest periods of the Greek worship; they were different for different deities, and formed as it were the first rudiments of the hymns which began and ended with them. Paeans were sung, not only when there was a hope of being able, by the help of the gods, to overcome a great and imminent danger, but when the danger was happily past; they were songs of hope and confidence as well as of " Thammuz came next behind, Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties, all a summer's day, While smooth Adonis from his native rock Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood Of Thammuz yearly wounded.'' — Paradise Lost, i. 44G. t ii. 79. X On the subject of these plaintive songs generally see Holler's Dorians, book ii. ch. 8, § 12 (vol. i. p. 366, English translation), and Thirlwall in the Philolo» Museum, vol. i. p. 110. § ovS'. SiTif 'A^tXriO. x.iviolTcr.1 a'lXiva f*.nrr)(>, ottit' <i Wnnii, uKoiffn. v ; x. — Hymn. Apoll. 20. i 2
 * Beautifully described in the well-known verses of Milton: —