Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/89

67 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREFCF. (37 the poem, which promises so much, and has been censured as airogant, "I sing of Ilion, and Dardania famous for its horses, on whose account the Greeks, the servants of Mars, suffered many evils*." Before proceeding any further I feel myself hound to justify the above account of the relation between Arctinus and Lesches, since Proclus, the well-known philosopher and grammarian, to whose Chres- tomathia we are indebted for the fullest account of the epic eyelet, represents it in a totally different point of view. Proclus gives us, as an abritlgment of the Cyclic poets, a continuous narrative of the events of the Trojan war, in which one poet always precisely takes up another, often in the midst of a closely connected subject. Thus, ac- cording to Proclus, Arctinus continued the Homeric Iliad up to the contest for the arms of Achilles; then Lesches relates the result of this contest, and the subsequent enterprises of the heroes against Troy until the introduction of the wooden horse within the walls ; at this point Arctinus resumes the thread of the narrative, and describes the issuing forth of the heroes inclosed in the wooden horse ; but he too breaks off in the midst of the history of the return of the Greeks at the point where Minerva devises a plan for their punishment : the fulfilment of this plan being related by Agias, in the poem called the Nostoi. In order to make such an interlacing of the different poems comprehensible, we must suppose the existence of an academy of poets, dividing their materials amongst each other upon a distinct understanding, and with the most minute precision. It is, however, altogether inconceivable that Arctinus should have twice suddenly broken off in the midst of actions, which the curiosity of his hearers could never have permitted him to leave unfinished, in order that, almost a century after, Lesches, and probably at a still later date Agias, might fill up the gaps and com- plete the narrative. Moreover, as the extant fragments of Arctinus and Lesches afford sufficient proof that they both sang of the events which, according to the abstract of Proclus, formed an hiatus in their poems, it is easy to perceive that his account was not drawn up from these poems according to their original forms, but from a selection made by some grammarian, who had put together a connected poetical descrip- tion of these events from the works of several Cyclic poets, in which no occurrence was repeated, but nothing of importance was omitted : and this indeed the expressions of Proclus himself appear to indicate}. In fact, the Cyclus in this sense included not only the epoch of the Trojan war (where the poems were mutually connected by means of H; cT£o) troXXa iraQov Aavao), fapccvrovris ' Apyio;. fur alte LittiTatur und Kunsr, Part i, inedita, afterwards in Gaisford's Hephsestiun, p. 378, seq., 472, seq., and elsewhere. if K«j •ri^a.roura.i o Itiko; xvxXos Ik Itatyo^wt 'Tainvuv ruu.TXngnvp.tiiii; /*(%/>> rrif avrt- (ixiriw; ' Oiutrc'iui rvj; uc 'Mkhv. — Proclus, ubi Slip. f a
 * ' lXit>> aiiiu kx) Aafiaviw iifuXov,
 * This part of the Chrestomathia was first published in the Gottingon Bibliothek