Five states specially engage our attention. Four are Dorian: Thèbes, the centre of Boeotia (the use of the word Boeotian in English preserves its reputation); Corinth, a great commercial centre; Argos, though Dorian, a jealous enemy of its greater Dorian neighbour Sparta; Sparta, a byword for conservatism and for such a militarism as the world has never seen. The Spartans were the best soldiers in Greece; their town, unwalled in those ages of war, reveals the spirit of its inhabitants; their name has become a synonym for hardy simplicity, and thinkers in other Greek states, like Plato, weary of self-indulgent democracy, at times envied the austere discipline of Sparta, as Carlyle admired Prussia. But these virtues were paid for by the extinction in Sparta of art, literature, and thought. In this period she becomes the dominant state in the Peloponnese. Finally there is the Ionian Athens. In these years we see her developing from kingship through oligarchy and tyranny to a democracy, in which freedom of opportunity is secured to all, and the people has the deciding voice in the law courts and the ecclesia, or political assembly of the nation. Of these five states, Thebes is to produce one great poet; the militarist Sparta, the commercial Corinth are and remain insignificant in everything but war and trade: Athens as yet shows no signs of what she is to be. The centres of poetry and, from the seventh century, of thought are on the coast of Asia Minor, and in a less degree in the Italian and Sicilian colonies. Greece herself is struggling with a poor soil and political upheavals, and literature flowers first in the richer communities across the sea. To this literature we must now turn.

Homer is the greatest and the only survivor of a crowd of epic poets, who wrote on different episodes of the Trojan War and on other subjects of mythology. Passing over these, and over Hesiod, the father of didactic poetry, whose Works and Days treated in hexameters of the farmer's life, we come, two centuries after Homer, to the age of lyric poetry. It is characteristic of the Greeks that the different poetic genres develop in turn, and are separated from their predecessors by a clearer dividing-line than can be drawn in modern literatures. In Greece the lyric supersedes the epic and holds the stage completely for some 150 years, till it in turn fades before the age of drama. These divisions reflect the development of the national mind. Epic is the offspring of its childhood, delighting in stories for their own sake; lyric, of which the essence is the expression of personal

feelings, represents its adolescence, the age of emotion, conscious of itself and at moments touched by reflection; drama is its manhood, facing the problems of the world and life with all the forces of a full-grown mind.

Any one glancing at the fragmentary remains of Greek lyric poetry would be struck by two qualities, characteristic of the Greek genius, rich creativeness and an instinct for system. Starting in the seventh century without external models or inspiration, the Greeks produced this amazingly rich and various harvest, one crop following another for two hundred years without intermission or check. With this amazing fertility goes an instinctive systematization. That gift of method, which later taught the Greeks to map out the field of human knowledge under the various sciences and the different sections of philosophy, is seen at work here. Apart from the ode, the song, and the sonnet, it is difficult to assign modern lyrics to clearly defined classes. An index to the works of an English poet will show lyrics of some three types. An index to Greek lyric poetry will show infinitely more species. Of Pindar alone we possess fragments in ten distinct varieties. And each variety of Greek lyric has its special characteristics and use; some have special metres, some special instruments—the harp with four strings, the harp with twenty, the flute, &c.-some are performed with dance, some with marching; some are sung by one performer, others by choirs.

An ancient critic divided Greek lyric, or, as it is called, 'melic', poetry into twenty-one different varieties. Of these the threnos or dirge, the hymn, the elegy, and the epithalamium have survived in our literary vocabulary, which bears other marks of this period in words like dithyrambic, ode, lyric, choric. The simpler metres are the property of all languages: the more complicated and characteristic ones do not lend themselves to English use, though elegiacs, Sapphics, and Alcaics make occasional appearances. We need not trouble about either the different types of lyric or their history, except to note that in the one hundred and fifty years between Archilochus, the creator of the elegy, and Pindar, the greatest master of the choral ode, the Greeks created and developed type after type of lyric with a wonderful combination of system and freedom.

1 Strictly speaking, the Greeks did not include it in melic' poetry. Its mark was the elegiac metre: and it was not confined to laments, as with us.

In that century and a half a small seed grows into a tree with many branches, each loaded with fruit.

If we possessed a tithe of this poetry, we should know the inner life and emotions of men and women on the shores of the Mediterranean from the seventh century to the Persian Wars. Most of the singers were Ionians from the coast of Asia-Lesbos is a famous centre-where life blossomed earlier than in Greece. But there are representatives from Greek towns in Italy; the Athenian statesman Solon put his thoughts on life into elegies; and even Sparta, not yet hardened into mere militarism, has its poets. In the tiny fragments that survive we have the complaints of an aristocratic émigré against the democracy, the war songs of a Spartan general, the lampoons of a Samian politician against the female sex, glimpses into the thoughts of several women, confidences of exiles and adventurers, the private quarrels, loves, regrets, and moralizings of a generation that felt passionately and wrote frankly.

Of these lyric poets, Pindar and Sappho never disappoint. Apart from these, few of the fragments are great as poetry, though nearly all have a peculiar freshness and vigour, and show an instinct for form: most of them were preserved by grammarians and scholars, who had other things in view than literature. If we possessed the poems entire, we should find their range narrower than that of the modern lyric. The moderns express the emotions of a soul, more complex, more rich morally and spiritually than that of the seventh-century Greek'.1 It is with the songs of Shakespeare or Burns or Scott that we must compare these lyrics-I am thinking here of the song writers, not of poets like Pindar-and the best of them are worthy of the comparison. They have not the compass or variety of Shelley or Keats, any more than a bird has the compass of a piano; but many have in the original the clearness, purity, and beauty of a bird's song.

Lyric poetry is notoriously untranslatable; and the simpler it is, the more difficult to translate. A literal rendering is almost certain to miss its delicate grace, and the translator is forced to amplify and develop then the simplicity is lost. I shall therefore only quote a few specimens.

ALCMAN (seventh century). Born at Sardis in Lydia but spent his life at Sparta. One of the founders of Greek choral poetry. 1 Croiset, Hist. de la Litt. grecque, ii. 265.

NIGHT IN THE VALLEY

LEEP broods o'er the mountain crest,
And the folds of the hill,

Hollow and headland rest,

Silent and still.

All things are slumbering,

Not a leaf is stirred,

Of insect or creeping thing

No rustle is heard.

The beasts of the mountain sleep,

And the murmuring bees,

And the monsters that haunt the deep

Of the purple seas;

The swift winged tribes of the air

Have ceased from their flight....1

VOICES

THE AGED POET

VOICES of honey-sweet, haunting music,
Maidens, your poet is tired and gray;

O for the wings of the bird that hovers

Where the crest of the salt wave flowers in spray,

Sea-blue bird of the April weather,

Careless at heart, where the halcyons play."

MIMNERMUS of Colophon in Ionia (late seventh century). Fragment of an elegy.

THE LABOUR OF THE SUN

URELY the Sun has labour all his days,
And never any respite, steeds nor god,
Since Eōs first, whose hands are rosy rays,

Ocean forsook and Heaven's high pathway trod;

1 Fr. 60, tr. J. A. Pott, Greek Love Songs and Epigrams. It shows the haphazard way in which these fragments have survived, that this one has been preserved by a Greek lexicographer, who quoted it to illustrate the meaning of the word translated' monsters'.

2 Fr. 26. Alcman was famous for partheneia, songs written for choruses of girls.

At night across the sea that wondrous bed
Shell-hollow, beaten by Hephaestus' hand,
Of winged gold and gorgeous, bears his head

Half-waking on the wave, from eve's red strand
To the Ethiop shore, where steeds and chariot are

Keen-mettled, waiting for the morning star.1

We know little of Sappho except that she lived in Lesbos in the early sixth century and was married, that she was exiled, returned, and had a school of young poetesses. It is difficult for her admirers to speak of her with moderation. 'A wonderful creature,' says one ancient writer; 'you will look through history in vain to find a woman even distantly comparable to her.' Her speech is mixed with fire,' says another. She shares with a few poets the power of writing magical poetry while using the simplest language. We possess some short fragments by her, and a few fragmentary poems. I quote one of the latter in a prose rendering. It gives us a glimpse of the poetess, sitting with a companion in Mitylene, her home, and talking of an old friend, Arignota, now married and living in Sardis some ninety miles away. away. The poem shows the hour and scene.

F

ROM Sardis her thoughts often turn hither. When we lived together, she held you ever as a goddess and loved your sing

ing above all. Now she shines among the women of Lydia, as the rosy-fingered moon, when the sun sets, shines brighter than all the stars. The light falls on the salt sea and on the fields deep in flowers. The dew descends in beauty, and the roses are in bloom and the clovers and flowering grasses. Arignota wanders up and down and thinks of gentle Atthis, and her thoughts are heavy with longing and her heart with distress. She calls aloud for us to come to her, but Night with the thousand eyes does not carry the words across the sea, and we cannot hear.4

1 Fr. 12, tr. G. Murray. The poem alludes to the story that during the night the sun was carried in a golden bowl across the sea to his place of rising in the East. Eos is the Dawn.

2 Most of the fragments, with English versions and imitations of them, can be read in Wharton's Sappho.

If this is a proper name.

• Berlin fragment.