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different kinds of Greek literature during the classical age existed not so much side by side as successively. In modern times, Tennyson and Goethe composed not only lyric and dramatic poems, but also epics on a small scale, but in Greece no single poet tried his powers in these three classes of literature; still less did he compose not only all kinds of poetry, but also artistic and scientific prose. Probably lyric poetry, songs in praise of the gods, songs of love and of war, songs of joy and of grief, preceded epic poetry in Greece as in India; but these earliest lays have all perished. Greek lyric poetry as we know it was in its beginning when the light of epic poetry was waning, and it passed its highest glory before dramatic poetry reached its zenith. And though the drama had but a short life, its glory was passing before the historian's art was perfected, and this in turn yielded to oratory and the dialogues of Philosophy. Bucolic poetry was the only new kind of literature to be developed after the middle of the fourth century before the beginning of our era.

Greek lyric poetry had two main divisions,—the Aeolic personal poetry of Asia Minor, that of Sappho and Alcaeus, which served as a model to the Roman Horace; and the choral poetry which flourished particularly among the Dorians, and from which Attic tragedy with its choral songs was developed. To the latter division belongs the poetry of Alcman, Simonides, and Pindar.

Pindar, the greatest and the last of the great lyric poets of Greece, was almost the exact contemporary of Aeschylus,