at the close of the 5th century to Bacchylides and Pindar, in whom the magnificent tradition of the dithyrambic odes reached its highest splendour of development. The practice of Pindar and Sappho, we may say, has directed the course of lyrical poetry ever since, and will, unquestionably, continue to do so. They discovered how, with the maximum of art, to pour forth strains of personal magic and music, whether in a public or a private way. The ecstasy, the uplifted magnificence, of lyrical poetry could go no higher than it did in the unmatched harmonies of these old Greek poets, but it could fill a much wider field and be expressed with vastly greater variety. It did so in their own age. The gnomic verses of Theognis were certainly sung; so were the satires of Archilochus and the romantic reveries of Mimnermus.
At the Renaissance, when the traditions of ancient life were taken up eagerly, and hastily comprehended, it was thought proper to divide poetry into a diversity of classes. The earliest English critic who enters into a discussion of the laws of prosody, William Webbe, lays it down, in 1586, that in verse “the most usual kinds are four, the heroic, elegiac, iambic and lyric.” Similar confusion of terms was common among the critics of the 15th and 16th centuries, and led to considerable error. It is plain that a border ballad is heroic, and may yet be lyrical; here the word “heroic” stands for “epic.” It is plain that whether a poem is lyrical or not had nothing to do with the question whether it is composed in an iambic measure. Finally, it is undoubted that the early Greek “elegies” were sung to an accompaniment on the flute, whether they were warlike, like those of Tyrtaeus, or philosophical and amatory like those of Theognis. But (see Elegy) the present significance of “elegy,” and this has been the case ever since late classical times, is funereal; in modern parlance an elegy is a dirge. Whether the great Alexandrian dirges, like those of Bion and of Moschus, on which our elegiacal tradition is founded, were actually sung to an accompaniment or not may be doubted; they seem too long, too elaborate, and too ornate for that. But, at any rate, they were composed on the convention that they would be sung, and it is conceivable that music might have been wedded to the most complex of these Alexandrian elegies. Accordingly, although Lycidas and Adonais are not habitually “set to music,” there is no reason why they should not be so set, and their rounded and limited although extensive form links them with the song, not with the epic. There are many odes of Swinburne’s for which it would be more difficult to write music than for his Ave atque Vale. In fact, in spite of its solemn and lugubrious regularity, the formal elegy or dirge is no more nor less than an ode, and is therefore entirely lyrical.
More difficulty is met with in the case of the sonnet, for although no piece of verse, when it is inspired by subjective passion, fits more closely with Hegel’s definition of what lyrical poetry should be, yet the rhythmical complication of the sonnet, and its rigorous uniformity, seem particularly ill-fitted to interpretation on a lyre. When F. M. degli Azzi put the book of Genesis (1700) into sonnets, and Isaac de Benserade the Metamorphoses of Ovid (1676) into rondeaux, these eccentric and laborious versifiers produced what was epical rather than lyrical poetry, if poetry it was at all. But the sonnet as Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Petrarch used it was a cry from the heart, a subjective confession, and although there is perhaps no evidence that a sonnet was ever set to music with success, yet there is no reason why that might not be done without destroying its sonnet-character.
Jouffroy was perhaps the first aesthetician to see quite clearly that lyrical poetry is, really, nothing more than another name for poetry itself, that it includes all the personal and enthusiastic part of what lives and breathes in the art of verse, so that the divisions of pedantic criticism are of no real avail to us in its consideration. We recognize a narrative or epical poetry; we recognize drama; in both of these, when the individual inspiration is strong, there is much that trembles on the verge of the lyrical. But outside what is pure epic and pure drama, all, or almost all, is lyrical. We say almost all, because the difficulty arises of knowing where to place descriptive and didactic poetry. The Seasons of Thomson, for instance, a poem of high merit and lasting importance in the history of literature—where is that to be placed? What is to be said of the Essay on Man? In primitive times, the former would have been classed under epic, the second would have been composed in the supple iambic trimeter which so closely resembled daily speech, and would not have been sharply distinguished from prose. Perhaps this classification would still serve, were it not for the element of versification, which makes a sharp line of demarcation between poetic art and prose. This complexity of form, rhythmical and stanzaic, takes much of the place which was taken in antiquity by such music as Terpander is supposed to have supplied. In a perfect lyric by a modern writer the instrument is the metrical form, to which the words have to adapt themselves. There is perhaps no writer who has ever lived in whose work this phenomenon may be more fruitfully studied than it may be in the songs and lyrics of Shelley. The temper of such pieces as “Arethusa” and “The Cloud” is indicated by a form hardly more ambitious than a guitar; Hellas is full of passages which suggest the harp; in his songs Shelley touches the lute or viol de gamba, while in the great odes to the “West Wind” and to “Liberty” we listen to a verse-form which reminds us by its volume of the organ itself. On the whole subject of the nature of lyric poetry no commentary can be more useful to the student than an examination of the lyrics of Shelley in relation to those of the songwriters of ancient Greece.
See Hegel, Die Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807); T. S. Jouffroy, Cours d’esthétique (1843); W. Christ, Metrik der Griechen und Römer, 2te. Aufl. (1879). (E. G.)
LYSANDER (Gr. Λύσανδρος), son of Aristocritus, Spartan
admiral and diplomatist. Aelian (Var. Hist. xii. 43) and Phylarchus
(ap. Athen. vi. 271 e) say that he was a mothax, i.e. the son
of a helot mother (see Helots), but this tradition is at least
doubtful; according to Plutarch he was a Heraclid, though not
of either royal family. We do not know how he rose to eminence:
he first appears as admiral of the Spartan navy in 407 B.C. The
story of his influence with Cyrus the Younger, his naval victory off
Notium, his quarrel with his successor Callicratidas in 406, his
appointment as ἐπιστολεύς in 405, his decisive victory at Aegospotami,
and his share in the siege and capitulation of Athens
belong to the history of the Peloponnesian War (q.v.). By 404
he was the most powerful man in the Greek world and set about
completing the task of building up a Spartan empire in which
he should be supreme in fact if not in name. Everywhere
democracies were replaced by oligarchies directed by bodies
of ten men (decarchies, δεκαρχίαι) under the control of Spartan
governors (harmosts, ἁρμοσταί). But Lysander’s boundless influence
and ambition, and the superhuman honours paid him,
roused the jealousy of the kings and the ephors, and, on being
accused by the Persian satrap Pharnabazus, he was recalled to
Sparta. Soon afterwards he was sent to Athens with an army
to aid the oligarchs, but Pausanias, one of the kings, followed
him and brought about a restoration of democracy. On the death
of Agis II., Lysander secured the succession of Agesilaus (q.v.),
whom he hoped to find amenable to his influence. But in this
he was disappointed. Though chosen to accompany the king to
Asia as one of his thirty advisers (σύμβουλοι), he was kept inactive
and his influence was broken by studied affronts, and
finally he was sent at his own request as envoy to the Hellespont.
He soon returned to Sparta to mature plans for overthrowing
the hereditary kingship and substituting an elective monarchy
open to all Heraclids, or even, according to another version, to
all Spartiates. But his alleged attempts to bribe the oracles were
fruitless, and his schemes were cut short by the outbreak of war
with Thebes in 395. Lysander invaded Boeotia from the west,
receiving the submission of Orchomenus and sacking Lebadea,
but the enemy intercepted his despatch to Pausanias, who had
meanwhile entered Boeotia from the south, containing plans for
a joint attack upon Haliartus. The town was at once strongly
garrisoned, and when Lysander marched against it he was defeated
and slain. He was buried in the territory of Panopeus, the
