Читать книгу The History of Ancient Greek Literature - Gilbert Murray - Страница 20

The use of the word 'lyric' to denote all poetry that is not epic or dramatic, is modern in origin and inaccurate. The word implies that the poetry was sung to a lyre accompaniment, or, by a slight extension of meaning, to some accompaniment. But the epos itself was originally sung. 'Homern' had a lyre, 'Hesiod' either a lyre or a staff. And, on the other hand, the 'lyric' elegy and iambus began very soon to drop their music. All Greek poetry originates in some form of song, in words combined with music; and the different forms of poetry either gradually cast off their music as they required attention and clearness of thought, or fell more under the sway of music as they aimed at the expression of vague feeling. We can seldom say whether a given set of words were meant for speaking or for singing. Theognis's elegies seem to have been sung at banquets to a flute accompaniment; Plato, in speaking of Solon, uses sometimes the word 'sing,' sometimes 'recite.' The two chief marks of song as against speech are, what we call the strophe or stanza, and the protracted dwelling of the voice on one syllable. For instance, the pentameter, which is made out of the hexameter by letting one long syllable count for two at the end of each half of the line, is more 'lyric' than the plain hexameter; and the elegy, with its couplets of hexameters and pantameters, more lyric than the uniformly hexametric epos. The syncopated iambic produces one of the grandest of Æschylean song-metres, while the plain iambic trimeter is the form of poetry nearest to prose.

We hear of traditional tunes in Greece only by desultory and unscientific accounts. The 'Skolia' or drinkingsongs had a very charming traditional tune for which no author is mentioned. Various flute-tunes, such as 'the Many-headed,' 'the Chariot,' are attributed to a certain Olympus, a Phrygian, son of the satyr Marsyas, whose historical credit cannot be saved by calling him 'the younger Olympus.' The lyre-tunes go back mostly to Terpander of Antissa, in Lesbos. Two statements about him have a certain suggestiveness. When Orpheus was torn to pieces -- as a Bacchic incarnation had to be -- by the Thracian women, his head and lyre floated over the sea to Terpander's island. Terpander is thus the developer of Æolic or native Greek harp-music. But he also learned, we are told, from the Cretan Chrysothemis. Now, Crete was one of the first Dorian settlements. So Terpander is a junction of the native string-music with that of the Dorian invader. All that we know of him, his name 'Charmer-of-men' included, has the stamp of myth. He gave the lyre seven strings instead of four. Seven tunes are mentioned as his invention; one particularly, called the 'Terpandrian Nomos,' is characterised by its seven divisions, instead of the simple three, Beginning, Middle, and End. He won four musical prizes at Delphi -- at a time before there were any contests. He is the first musical victor in the Carneia at Sparta. All these contests existed at first without fixed records, and the original victor is generally mythical.

The conclusion is that, as there was heroic legend, so there was song in most cantons of Greece before our earliest records. The local style varied, and music was generally classified on a geographical basis -- 'the Phrygian style,' 'the Ionian,' 'the Dorian,' ' the hypo-Dorian,' 'the hyper-Phrygian,' 'the Lesbian,' and so on. The division is puzzling to us because it is so crude, and because it implies a concrete knowledge of the particular styles to start with. The disciples of Socrates, who saw every phenomenon with the eye of the moralist, are strong upon the ethical values of the various divisions: the Dorian has dignity and courage, the Phrygian is wild and exciting, the Lydian effeminate, the Æolian expresses turbulent chivalry. This sounds arbitrary; and it is satisfactory to find that while Plato makes the Ionic style 'effeminate and bibulous,' his sciple Heraclîdes says it is 'austere and proud.' The Socratic tradition especially finds a moral meaning in the difference between string and wind instruments. The harp allows you to remain master of yourself, a free and thinking man; the flute, pipe, or clarionette, or whatever corresponds to the various kinds of 'aulos,' puts you beside yourself, obscures reason, and is more fit for barbarians. As a matter of fact, the 'aulos' was the favourite instrument in Sparta, Bœotia, and Delphi. Too stimulating for the sensitive Athenian, it fairly suited the Dorian palate. It would probably be milkand-water to us.

The local styles of music had generally corresponding styles of metre. Those of Lesbos and Teos, for instance, remained simple; their music appeals even to an untrained ear. The ordinary Ionic rhythms need only be once felt to be full of magic, the Dorian are a little harder, while many of the Æolian remain unintelligible except to the most sympathetic students. The definite rules, the accompaniment of rhythmic motion and constant though subordinate music, enabled the Greeks to produce metrical effects which the boldest and most melodious of English poets could never dream of approaching. There is perhaps no department of ancient achievement which distances us so completely as the higher lyric poem. We have developed music separately, and far surpassed the Greeks in that great isolated domain, but at what a gigantic sacrifice!

The origin of the word Elegy is obscure. It may have been originally a dirge metre accompanied, when sung, by the 'aulos.' But we meet it first in war-songs, and it became in course of time the special verse for love. The oldest known elegist, CALLÎNUS, comes from Ephesus, and writes in a dialect like that used in the Ionic parts of Homer. His wars are partly against the invading Kimmerians (about 650 B.C.), partly against the town of Magnesia. He was about contemporary with the great Archilochus (p. 86 ); but Callinus speaks of Magnesia as still fighting, while Archilochus mentions its fall. TYRTÆUS of Aphidna wrote elegiac war-songs for the Spartans in the Second Messenian War ( 685-668 B.C.), and speaks as a Dorian noble, a Spartiate. But there was an Aphidna in Attica as well as in Laconia; and Athenian malice remodelled an old joke into the anecdote that Sparta, hard pressed in the war, had sent to Athens for a leader, and that Athens had sent them a lame schoolmaster, who woke the dull creatures up, and led them to victory. In the same spirit, the Samians used to tell how they lent the men of Priênê a prophetess to help them against the Carians -- even a Samian old woman could teach the Prieneans how to fight! Tyrtæus becomes a semi-comic character in the late non-Spartan tradition -- for instance, in the Messenian epic of Rhiânus ( third century B.C.); but his Doric name, the fact that his songs were sung in Crete as well as in the Peloponnese, and the traditional honours paid to him at Lacedæmonian feasts, suggest that he was a personification of the Doric war-elegy, and that all authorless Doric war-songs became his property -- for instance, the somewhat unarchaic lines quoted by the orator Lycurgus. The poems were, of course, originally in Doric; but our fragments have been worked over into Ionic dress,3 and modernised. The collection, which includes some anapæstic marching-songs, comes from Alexandria, and has the special title Eunomia, 'Law and Order.'

The greatest poet among the elegists is MIMNERMUS of Colophon. He is chiefly celebrated for his Nanno,* a long poem, or a collection of poems, on love or past lovers, called by the name of his mistress, who, like himself, was a flute-player. But his war fragments are richer than those of Tyrtæus or Callînus, and apart from either love or war he has great romantic beauty. For instance, the fragment: --

"Surely the Sun has labour all his days,

And never any respite, steeds nor god,

Since Éos first, whose hands are rosy rays,

Ocean forsook, and Heaven's high pathway trod;

At night across the sea that wondrous bed

Shell-hollow, beaten by Hephaistos' hand,

Of wingèd 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."

The influence of Mimnermus increased with time, and the plan of his Nanno* remained a formative idea to the great elegiac movement of Alexandria and its Roman imitators. There is music and character in all that he writes, and spirit where it is wanted, as in the account of the taking of Smyrna.

The shadowiness of these non-Attic poets strikes us as soon as we touch the full stream of Attic tradition in SOLON, son of Exekestides ( 639-559 B.C.). The tradition is still story rather than history, but it is there: his travels, his pretended madness, his dealings with the tyrant Pisistratus. The travels were probably, in reality, ordinary commercial voyages, but they made a fine background for the favourite Greek conception of the Wise Wanderer. We hear, in defiance of chronology, how he met the richest of kings, Crœsus, who showed all his glory and then asked who was the 'most fortunate' man in the world. Solon named him certain obscure persons who had done their duty and were loved by their neighbours and were now safely dead. The words seemed meaningless at the time, but had their due effect afterwards -- on Crœsus when Cyrus was in the act of burning him to death; and on Cyrus when he heard the story and desisted from his cruel pride.

Solon was a soldier and statesman who had written love-poetry in his youth, and now turned his skill in verse to practical purposes, circulating political poems as his successors two centuries later circulated speeches and pamphlets. It is not clear how far this practice was borrowed from the great towns of Ionia, how far it was a growth of the specially Athenian instinct for politics. We possess many considerable fragments, elegiac, iambic, and trochaic, which are of immense interest as historical documents; while as poetry they have something of the hardness and dulness of the practical man. The most interesting bits are on the war against Megara for the possession of Salamis, and on the 'Seisachtheia' or 'Offshaking of Burdens,'as Solon's great legislative revolution was called. As a reforming statesman, Solon was beaten by the extraordinary difficulties of the time; he lived to see the downfall of the constitution he had framed, and the rise of Pisistratus; but something in his character kept him alive in the memory of Athens as the type of the great and good lawgiver, who might have been a'Tyrannos,' but would not for righteousness' sake. THEOGNIS of Megara, by far the best preserved of the elegists, owes his immortality to his maxims, the brief statements of practical philosophy which the Greeks called 'Gnômai' and the Romans 'Sentenliœ.' Some are merely moral --

"Fairest is righteousness, and best is health,And sweetest is to win the heart's desire."

Some are bitter --

"Few men can cheat their haters, Kyrnos mine;Only true love is easy to betray!"

Many show the exile waiting for his revenge --

"Drink while they drink, and, though thine heart be galled,Let no man living count the wounds of it:There comes a day for patience, and a dayFor deeds and joy, to all men and to thee!"

Theognis's doctrine is not food for babes. He is a Dorian noble, and a partisan of the bitterest type in a state renowned for its factions. He drinks freely; he speaks of the Demos as 'the vile'or as 'my enemies';once he prays Zeus to "give him their black blood to drink." That was when the Demos had killed all his friends, and driven him to beggary and exile, and the proud man had to write poems for those who entertained him. We hear, for instance, of an elegy on some Syracusans slain in battle. Our extant remains are entirely personal ebullitions of feeling or monitory addresses, chiefly to his squire Kyrnos. His relations with Kyrnos are typical of the Dorian soldier. He takes to battle with him a boy, his equal in station, to whom he is 'like a father'(l. 1049). He teaches him all the duties of Dorian chivalry -- to fight, to suffer in silence, to stick to a friend, to keep clear of falsehood, and to avoid associating with 'base men.' He is pledged to bring the boy back safe, or die on the field himself; and he is disgraced if the boy does not grow up to be a worthy and noble Dorian. In the rest of his relations with the squire, there is some sentiment which we cannot enter into: there were no women in the Dorian camps. It is the mixed gift of good and evil brought by the Dorian invaders to Greece, which the true Greek sometimes over-admired because it was so foreign to him -- self-mastery, courage, grossness, and pride, effective devotion to a narrow class and an uncivilised ideal. Our MSS. of Theognis come from a collection made for educational purposes in the third century B.C., and show that state of interpolation which is characteristic of the schoolbook. Whole passages of Solon, Mimnermus, Tyrtæus, and another elegist Euênus, originally jotted on the margin for purposes of comparison, have now crept into the text. The order of the 'Gnomes' is confused; and we sometimes have what appear to be two separate versions of the same gnome, an original and an abbreviation. There is a certain blindness of frank pride and chivalry, a depth of hatred and love, and a sense of mystery, which make Theognis worthy of the name of poet.

The gnomic movement receives its special expression in the conception of the Seven Wise Men. They provide the necessary mythical authorship for the widespread proverbs and maxims -- the 'Know thyself,'which was written up on the temple at Delphi; the 'Nothing too much,' 'Surety; loss to follow,'and the like, which were current in people's mouths. The Wise Ones were not always very virtuous. The tyrant Periander occurs in some of the lists, and the quasi-tyrant Pittacus in all: their wisdom was chiefly of a prudential tendency. A pretended edition of their works was compiled by the fourth-century (?) orator, Lobon of Argos. Riddles, as well as gnomes, are a form of wisdom; and several ancient conundrums are attributed to the sage Kleobîlus, or else to 'Kleobulina,' the woman being explained as a daughter of the man: it seemed, perhaps, a feminine form of wisdom.

The gnome is made witty by the contemporaries PHOKYLIDES of Miletus and DEMODOCUS of Leros (about 537 B.C.). Their only remains are in the nature of epigrams in elegiac metre. Demodocus claims to be the inventor of a very fruitful jest: "This, too, is of Demodocus: The Chians are bad; not this man good and that bad, but all bad, except Procles. And even Procles is a Chian!"There are many Greek and Latin adaptations of that epigram before we get to Porson's condemnation of German scholars: "All save only Hermann; and Hermann's a German!" The form of introduction, "This, too, is of Phokylides," or "of Demodocus,"seems to have served these two poets as the mention of Kyrnos served Theognis. It was a 'seal' which stamped the author's name on the work. We have under the name of Phokylides a poem in two hundred and thirty-nine hexameters, containing moral precepts, which Bernays has shown to be the work of an Alexandrian Jew. It begins, "First honour God, and next thy parents";it speaks of the resurrection of the body, and agrees with Deuteronomy (xxii. 6) on the taking of birds' nests.

SEMONIDES of Amorgos (fl. 625 B.C.) owes the peculiar spelling of his name to grammarians who wished to distinguish him from his more illustrious namesake, Simônides of Keos. His elegies, a history of Samos among them, are lost; but Stobæus has preserved in his Anthology an iambic poem on women -- a counter-satire, apparently, on the waggon-songs in which the village women at certain festivals were licensed to mock their male acquaintances. The good woman in Semonides is like a bee, the attractive and extravagant like a mare, and so on. The pig-woman comes comparatively high in the scale, though she is lazy and fond of food.

There were three iambic poets regarded as 'classical' by the Alexandrian canon-Semonides, Archilochus, and HippŐnax. But, except possibly the last-named, no poet wrote iambics exclusively; and the intimate literary connection between, for instance, Theognis, Archilochus, and Hesiod, shows that the metrical division is unimportant. Much of Solon's work might, as far as the subject or the spirit is concerned, have been in elegiacs or iambics indifferently. The iambic metres appear to have been connected with the popular and homely gods Dionysus and Demeter, as the stately dactylic hexameters were with Zeus and Apollo. The iambic is the metre nearest to common speech; a Greek orator or an English newspaper gives a fair number of iambic verses to a column. Its service to Greek literature was to provide poetry with a verse for dialogue, and for the ever-widening range of subjects to which it gradually condescended. A Euripides, who saw poetry and meaning in every stone of a street, found in the current iambic trimeter a vehicle of expression in some ways more flexible even than prose. When it first appears in literature, it has a satirical colour.

ARCHILOCHUS of Paros (fl. 650 B.C.?) eclipsed all earlier writers of the iambus, and counts in tradition as the first. He was the 'Homer' of familiar personal poetry. This was partly due to a literary war in Alexandria, and partly to his having no rivals at his side. Still, even our scanty fragments justify Quintilian's criticism: "The sentences" really are "strong, terse, and quivering, full of blood and muscle; some people feel that if his work is ever inferior to the very highest, it must be the fault of his subject, not of his genius." This has, of course, another side to it. Archilochus is one of those masterful men who hate to feel humble. He will not see the greatness of things, and likes subjects to which he can feel himself superior. Yet, apart from the satires, which are blunt bludgeon work, his smallest scraps have a certain fierce enigmatic beauty. "Oh, hide the bitter gifts of our lord Poseidon!"is a cry to bury his friends' shipwrecked corpses. "In my spear is kneaded bread, in my spear is wine of Ismarus; and I lie upon my spear as I drink!"That is the defiant boast of the outlaw turned freebooter. "There were seven dead men trampled under foot, and we were a thousand murderers." What does that mean? One can imagine many things. The few lines about love form a comment on Sappho. The burning, colourless passion that finds its expression almost entirely in physical language may be beautiful in a soul like hers; but what a fierce, impossible thing it is with this embittered soldier of fortune, whose intense sensitiveness and prodigious intellect seem sometimes only to mark him out as more consciously wicked than his fellows! We can make out something of his life. He had to leave Paros -- one can imagine other reasons besides or before his alleged poverty -- and settled on Thasos, "a wretched island, bare and rough as a hog's back in the sea,"in company with all the worst scoundrels in Greece. In a battle with the natives of the mainland he threw away his shield and ran, and made very good jokes about the incident afterwards. He was betrothed to Cleobûlê, the daughter of a respectable Parian citizen, Lycambes. Lycambes broke off the engagement; Archilochus raged blindly and indecently at father and daughter for the rest of his life. Late tradition says they hanged themselves. Archilochus could not stay in Paros; the settlement in Thasos had failed; so he was thrown on the world, sometimes supporting himself as a mercenary soldier, sometimes doubtless as a pirate, until he was killed in a battle against Naxos. "I am a servant of the lord god of war, and I know the lovely gift of the Muses."He could fight and he could make wonderful poetry. It does not appear that any further good can be said of him.

Lower all round than Archilochus is HIPPÔNAX of Ephesus. Tradition makes him a beggar, lame and deformed himself, and inventor of the 'halting iambic' or 'scazon,' a deformed trimeter which upsets all one's expectations by having a spondee or trochee in the last foot. His works were all abusive. He inveighed especially against the artists Bupalos and Athênis, who had caricatured him; and of course against women -e.g., "A woman gives a man two days of pleasure: the day he marries her, and the day he carries out her corpse." Early satire does not imply much wit; it implies hard hitting, with words instead of sticks and stones. The other satirical writers of classical times, Ananius and Hermippus, Kerkidas and Aischrion, were apparently not much admired in Alexandria.

One form of satire, the Beast Fable, was especially developed in collections of stories which went under the name of ÆSOP. He seems to be a mere storyfigure, like Kerkôps or Kreophŷlus, invented to provide an author for the fables. He was a foreign slave -- Thracian, Phrygian, or Ethiopian -- under the same master as Rhodôpis, the courtesan who ruined Sappho's brother. He was suitably deformed; he was murdered at Delphi. Delphi dealt much in the deaths or tombs of celebrities. It used the graves of Neoptolemus and Hesiod to attract the sight-seer; it extorted monetary atonement from the slaver of Apollo's inspired servant Archilochus. But in Æsop's case a descendant of his master Iadmon made his murder a ground for claiming money from the Delphians; so it is hard to see why they countenanced the story. Tradition gave Æsop interviews with Crœsus and the Wise Men; Aristophanes makes it a jocular reproach, not to have 'trodden well' your Æsop. He is in any case not a poet, but the legendary author of a particular type of story, which any one was at liberty to put into verse, as Socrates did, or to collect in prose, like Demetrius of Phalærum. Our oldest collections of fables are the iambics of Phaedrus and the elegiacs of Avianus in Latin, and the scazons of Babrius in Greek, all three post-Christian.

1 W. M. Herakles, i. 66 seq. (2nd edition).

2 Our Sillos-like fragment must be by another man, not a Samian.

3 Cf. the mixture á øιλοχρηματíη Σπáρταυ óλεî.