Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/473

451 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 451 ancient heroic mythology.* The Dithyrambs of Melanippides announce this even by their titles, such as Mcwsyos, (in which, by a modification of the legend, Athena invents the flute, and on her throwing it away it is taken up by Marsyas,) Persephone, and the Danaidcs. The Cyclops of Philoxenus was in great repute ; in this the poet, who was well known in Sicily, introduced the beautiful Sicilian story of the love of the Cyclops Polyphemus for the sea-nymph Galatea, who on account of the beautiful Acis rejects his suit, till at last he takes deadly vengeance on his success- ful rival. From the verses in Aristophanes in which Philoxenus is paro- died, f we may pretty well see in what spirit this subject was treated. The Cyclops was represented as a harmless monster, a good-natured Caliban, who roams about the mountains followed by his bleating sheep and goats as if they were his children, and collects wild herbs in his wallet, and then half-drunk lays himself down to sleep in the midst of his flocks. In his love he becomes even poetical, and comforts himself for his rejection with songs which he thinks quite beautiful : even his lambs sympathize, with his sorrows and bleat longingly for the fair Ga- latea. In this whole poem (the subject of which Theocritus took up at a later period and with better taste formed it into an Idyll §) the ancients discerned covert allusions to the connexion of the poet with Dionysius, the poetizing tyrant of Sicily, who is said to have deprived Philoxenus of the object of his love. If we add to this the statement that Timotheus' Dithyramb, " the travails of Semcle," || passed with the ancients for an indecent and unimaginative representation of such ascene,*f[we shall have the means of forming a satisfactory judgment of the general nature of this new Dithyramb. There was no unity of thought ; no one tone pervading the whole poem, so as to preserve in the minds of the hearers a consistent train of feelings ; no subordination of the story to certain ethical ideas ; no artificially constructed system of verses regulated by fixed laws; but a loose and wanton play of lyrical sentiments, which were set in motion by the accidental impulses of some mythical story, and took now one direction, now another; preferring, however, to seize on such points as gave room for an immediate imitation in tones, and admitting a mode of description which luxuriated in sensual charms. Many monodies in the later tragedies of Euripides, such as Aristophanes ridicules in the " Frogs," have this sensual colouring, and in this want of a firm basis to rest upon t Pltttus, 290. 'The scrags of the sheep and goats, which the chorus was there to bleat forth to please Carion, refer to the imitations of these animals in the Dithyramb. $ Hermesianax Fragm. v. 7i. ♦ Theocrit. Id. i., where the reader -^lould consult the scholia. if Of this the witty Stratonicus said, " could she have cried out more piteously, if she had been bringing forth not a God, but a common mechanic I" Athen, VIII. p. 352. A. In a similar spirit Polyeidua made Atlas a shepherd in Libya. Tzetz. on Lycophr. 879. 2g 2
 * Chap. XIV. § 11. comp. XXI, § I.