Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/288

 270 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. any, tells of the Star and the Magi, and then gives a moving and dramatic story of Herod's fear and the Slaughter of the Innocents. The hymns of the Cathemerinon are skilfully writ- ten. Sometimes they express sweet Christian feeling, and very beautifully.^ Their metres seem well adapted to the contents. Iambic dimeter is most frequently used ; also the trochaic tetrameter with good effect. These are the two simplest of classical metres; and the other metres used are also simple. But the poet's fine sense of metrical fitness is best shown in the Peristephanon, his hymn-book of martyr- legends. Some of these legends still existed in popu- lar story, and some had been written in literary or rhetorical form. Likewise some of the hymns of the Peristephanon are popular, while others are not. The metres are suited to the character of the narrative. For example, the fourth hymn is a rhetorical pane- gyric on the martyrs of Saragossa, and is in sapphic strophes. Hymns IX and XI also are elevated and literary, and the poet uses in the one a couplet made of a hexameter and iambic tetrameter, and in the other the elegiac metre. The hymns of a popular character are of great interest. They are composed in the trochaic tetrameter^ and the iambic dimeter.^ Their contents were derived from the stories of the martyrs as told or sung on their festival days. They are beautiful illustrations of the finish of poetry set upon legend. First a martyrdom occurs. Then the legend rises, grows, and sometimes undergoes altera- 1 See, e.g., Hymn V, 149-161; X, 117-149; XII, 125-133. 2 Hymn I. « Hymns II and V.