few fragments have survived. In the city of tyrants it would have been dangerous to present comedies like those of the Athenian stage, in which attacks were made upon the authorities. Accordingly, the comedies of Epicharmus are of two kinds, neither of them calculated to give offence to the ruler. They are either mythological travesties (resembling the satyric drama of Athens) or character comedies. To the first class belong the Busiris, in which Heracles is represented as a voracious glutton; the Marriage of Hebe, remarkable for a lengthy list of dainties. The second class dealt with different classes of the population (the sailor, the prophet, the boor, the parasite). Some of the plays seem to have bordered on the political, as The Plunderings, describing the devastation of Sicily in the time of the poet. A short fragment has been discovered (in the Rainer papyri) from the Ὁδυσσεὺς αὐτόμολος, which told how Odysseus got inside Troy in the disguise of a beggar and obtained valuable information. Another feature of his works was the large number of excellent sentiments expressed in a brief proverbial form; the Pythagoreans claimed him as a member of their school, who had forsaken the study of philosophy for the writing of comedy. Plato (Theaetetus, 152 E) puts him at the head of the masters of comedy, coupling his name with Homer and, according to a remark in Diogenes Laërtius, Plato was indebted to Epicharmus for much of his philosophy. Ennius called his didactic poem on natural philosophy Epicharmus after the comic poet. The metres employed by Epicharmus were iambic trimeter, and especially trochaic and anapaestic tetrameter. The plot of the plays was simple, the action lively and rapid; hence they were classed among the fabulae motoriae (stirring, bustling), as indicated in the well-known line of Horace (Epistles, ii. 1. 58):
“Plautus ad exemplar Siculi properare Epicharmi.”
Epicharmus is the subject of articles in Suidas and Diogenes Laërtius (viii. 3). See A. O. Lorenz, Leben und Schriften des Koers E. (with account of the Doric drama and fragments, 1864); J. Girard, Études sur la poésie grecque (1884); Kaibel in Pauly-Wissowa’s Realencyclopädie, according to whom Epicharmus was a Siceliot; for the papyrus fragment, Blass in Jahrbücher für Philologie, cxxxix., 1889.
EPIC POETRY, or Epos (from the Gr. ἔπος, a story, and
ἐπικός, pertaining to a story), the names given to the most
dignified and elaborate forms of narrative poetry. The word
epopee is also, but more rarely, employed to designate the same
thing, ἐποποιὸς in Greek being a maker of epic poetry, and
ἐποποιΐα what he makes.
It is to Greece, where the earliest literary monuments which we possess are of an epical character, that we turn for a definition of these vast heroic compositions, and we gather that their subject-matter was not confined, as Voltaire and the critics of the 18th century supposed, to “narratives in verse of warlike adventures.” When we first discover the epos, hexameter verse has already been selected for its vehicle. In this form epic poems were composed not merely dealing with war and personal romance, but carrying out a didactic purpose, or celebrating the mysteries of religion. These three divisions, to which are severally attached the more or less mythical names of Homer, Hesiod and Orpheus seem to have marked the earliest literary movement of the Greeks. But, even here, we must be warned that what we possess is not primitive; there had been unwritten epics, probably in hexameters, long before the composition of any now-surviving fragment. The saga of the Greek nation, the catalogue of its arts and possessions, the rites and beliefs of its priesthood, must have been circulated, by word of mouth, long before any historical poet was born. We look upon Homer and Hesiod as records of primitive thought, but Professor Gilbert Murray reminds us that “our Iliad, Odyssey, Erga and Theogony are not the first, nor the second, nor the twelfth of such embodiments.” The early epic poets, Lesches, Linus, Orpheus, Arctinus, Eugammon are the veriest shadows, whose names often betray their symbolic and fabulous character. It is now believed that there was a class of minstrels, the Rhapsodists or Homeridae, whose business it was to recite poetry at feasts and other solemn occasions. “The real bards of early Greece were all nameless and impersonal.” When our tradition begins to be preserved, we find everything of a saga-character attributed to Homer, a blind man and an inhabitant of Chios. This gradually crystallized until we find Aristotle definitely treating Homer as a person, and attributing to him the composition of three great poems, the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Margites, now lost (see Homer). The first two of these have been preserved and form for us the type of the ancient epic; when we speak of epic poetry, we unconsciously measure it by the example of the Iliad and the Odyssey. It is quite certain, however, that these poems had not merely been preceded by a vast number of revisions of the mythical history of the country, but were accompanied by innumerable poems of a similar character, now entirely lost. That antiquity did not regard these other epics as equal in beauty to the Iliad seems to be certain; but such poems as Cypria, Iliou Persis (Sack of Ilion) and Aethiopis can hardly but have exhibited other sides of the epic tradition. Did we possess them, it is almost certain that we could speak with more assurance as to the scope of epic poetry in the days of oral tradition, and could understand more clearly what sort of ballads in hexameter it was which rhapsodes took round from court to court. In the 4th century B.C. it seems that people began to write down what was not yet forgotten of all this oral poetry. Unfortunately, the earliest critic who describes this process is Proclus, a Byzantine neo-Platonist, who did not write until some 800 years later, when the whole tradition had become hopelessly corrupted. When we pass from Homer and Hesiod, about whose actual existence critics will be eternally divided, we reach in the 7th century a poet, Peisander of Rhodes, who wrote an epic poem, the Heracleia, of which fragments remain. Other epic writers, who appear to be undoubtedly historic, are Antimachus of Colophon, who wrote a Thebais; Panyasis, who, like Peisander, celebrated the feats of Heracles; Choerilus of Samos; and Anyte, of whom we only know that she was an epic poetess, and was called “The female Homer.” In the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. there was a distinct school of philosophical epic, and we distinguish the names of Xenophanes, Parmenides and Empedocles as the leaders of it.
From the dawn of Latin literature epic poetry seems to have been cultivated in Italy. A Greek exile, named Livius Andronicus, translated the Odyssey into Latin during the first Punic War, but the earliest original epic of Rome was the lost Bellum Punicum of Naevius, a work to which Virgil was indebted. A little later, Ennius composed, about 172 B.C., in 18 books, an historical epic of the Annales, dealing with the whole chronicle of Rome. This was the foremost Latin poem, until the appearance of the Aeneid; it was not imitated, remaining, for a hundred years, as Mr Mackail has said, “not only the unique, but the satisfying achievement in this kind of poetry.” Virgil began the most famous of Roman epics in the year 30 B.C., and when he died, nine years later, he desired that the MS. of the Aeneid should be burned, as it required three years’ work to complete it. Nevertheless, it seems to us, and seemed to the ancient world, almost perfect, and a priceless monument of art; it is written, like the great Greek poems on which it is patently modelled, in hexameters. In the next generation, the Pharsalia of Lucan, of which Cato, as the type of the republican spirit, is the hero, was the principal example of Latin epic. Statius, under the Flavian emperors, wrote several epic poems, of which the Thebaid survives. In the 1st century A.D. Valerius Flaccus wrote the Argonautica in 8 books, and Silius Italicus the Punic War, in 17 books; these authors show a great decline in taste and merit, even in comparison with Statius, and Silius Italicus, in particular, is as purely imitative as the worst of the epic writers of modern Europe. At the close of the 4th century the style revived with Claudian, who produced five or six elaborate historical and mythological epics of which the Rape of Proserpine was probably the most remarkable; in his interesting poetry we have a valuable link between the Silver Age in Rome and the Italian Renaissance. With Claudian the history of epic poetry among the ancients closes.
In medieval times there existed a large body of narrative
