Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/87

65 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 05 poems (a fact winch is particularly evident in the excerpt of the Cypria) ; still their manner of treating and viewing mythical subjects differs so widely from that of Homer, as of itself to be a sufficient proof that the Homeric poems were no longer in progress of development at the time of the Cyclic poets, but had, on the whole, attained a settled form, to which no addition of importance was afterwards made*. Otherwise, we could not fail to recognise the traces of a later age in the interpolated passages of the Homeric poems. § 2. We commence with the poems which continued the. Iliad. Arctinus of Miletus was confessedly a very ancient poet, nay, he is even termed a disciple of Homer ; the chronological accounts place him immediately after the commencement of the Olympiads. His poem, consisting of 9,100 versesf (about one-third less than the Iliad), opened with the arrival of the Amazons at Troy, which followed immediately after the death of Hector. There existed in antiquity one recension of the Iliad, which concluded as follows : — "Thus they pei formed the funeral rites of Hector ; then came the Amazon, the daughter of the valorous man-destroying Aresj." This, without doubt, was the cyclic edition of the Homeric poems, more than once mentioned by the ancient critics : in which they appear to have been connected with the rest of the cyclus, so as to form an unbroken series. The same order of events also appears in several works of ancient sculpture, in which on one side Andromache is represented as weeping over Hector's ashes, while, on the other, the female warriors are welcomed by the venerable Priam. The action of the epic of Arctinus was connected with the following principal events. Achilles kills Penthesilea, and then in a fit of anger puts to death Thersites, who had ridiculed him for his love for her. Upon this Memnon, the son of Eos, appears with his Ethiopians, and is slain by the son of Thetis after he himself has killed in battle Antilochus, the Patroclus of Arctinus. Achilles himself falls by the hand of Paris while pursuing the Trojans into the town. His mother rescues his body from the funeral pile, and carries him restored to life to Leuce, an island in the Black Sea, where the mariners believed that they saw his mighty form flitting in the dusk of evening. Ajax and Ulysses contend for his arms; the defeat of Ajax causes his suicide §. Arctinus further related the his- chap. v. § 9. f According to the inscription of the tablet in the Museo Borgia (see Heeren r>il)liuthek der alten Literatur und Kunst, part iv p. CI) where it is said * * * * 'A£xt/vo]» tov MiXyviov xiyoviriv Itvv ovtu fy. The plural ovra refers to the two poems, according to the explanation in the text. "A{»o; iuyi.rn^ /uiyakrirofo; ivlg/Xfovoio. — Schol. Veil, ad II. xxiv. lilt. V. § See Schol. Find. Isthm. iii. 58, who quotes for this event the ^thiopis, and Schol. II. xi. 515, who quotes for it the 'IXmu mgw of Arctinus. I particularly men- tion this point; since, from the account in the Chrestomathia of Proclus, it might be thought that Arctinus had omitted this circumstance. F
 * In these remaiks we of course except the Catalogue of the Ships. See