Page:The Theatre of the Greeks, a Treatise on the History and Exhibition of the Greek Drama, with Various Supplements.djvu/70

 52 THE TRAGIC DIALOGUE. — THESPIS. in his native island of Paros and paved the way for the coarse banter of the old Comedy at Athens. The iambic verse, however, was very soon transferred from personal to general satire, from the invectives of the Margites, and from the fierce lampoons of Archilo- chus, to the more sweeping censures and more sententious generali- ties of gnomic and didactic poetry. Simonides of Amorgus, who flourished but a little later than Archilochus^ used the iambic metre in the discussion of subjects little differing from those in which Hesiod delighted. For example, his general animadver- sions on the female sex are almost anticipated by the humorous indignation of the Theogony^. But in other passages he approaches to the sententious gravity of the later tragedians. Thus, his reflec- tions on the uncertainty of human life might be taken for a speech from a lost tragedy, if the dialect were not inconsistent with such a supposition''. And the same remark is still more applicable to some of the trochaics and iambics of Solon, who lived to witness the first beginnings of Tragedy. Now all this iambic and trochaic poetry was written for rhapsodical recitation: for though we must allow (as even the advocates of the Wolfian hypothesis are willing to adniit^) that the poems of Archilochus were committed to writ- ing, it cannot be denied that the means of multiplying manuscripts in his time must have been exceedingly scanty; and that, if his opportunities of becoming known had been limited to the number of his readers, he could hardly have acquired his great reputation as a poet. We must, therefore, conclude that his poems, and those of Simonides, were promulgated by recitation; and as such of them as were written in iambics would not be sufficiently diversified 1 Miiller, Hist. Litt. Gr. c. xi. § 5, p. 132. 2 Archilochus is first heard of in the year 708 B.C. (Clinton, F. H. I. p. 175), and Simonides the elder is placed by Suidas 490 yeai'S after the Trojan era (b.c. 693. See Rhein. Mus. for 1835, p. 356). It is interesting to observe how the poetry of the colonists in Asia Minor seems to have crept across, step by step, to Attica and other parts of old Greece. Homer represents the greatest bard and rhapsode of the Homeric confraternity in Chios; Hesiod was an ^olian of Cyme; Arion a Lesbian; and the isles of Paros, Amorgos, and Ceos produced Archilochus and the two Simonides'. ^ Cf. Hesiod, Theog. 591 sqq. Simonides of Amorgos, Fragm,. 6, Bergk. The 5th fragment of Simonides, quoted by Clemens Alex. Strom. VI. p. 744 : VvvaiKos ovdeu XPV/^' o.vr]p Xyji'^erai 'Bcr^X'^s d/xeivov ov8^ piyiov kuktjs' is merely a repetition in Iambics of what Hesiod had previously written in Hexameters {Op. et D. 700) : Oi) ixkv yap TL yvuaLKos dpr]p X?;t^er' d/xeivov T-^s dyadr]s, rrjs S' adre KaK'tjs ov piyiov &o.
 * Simonid. Fr. r. 5 Wolf, Proleg. § 17.