diversified accompaniments, constitute an epoch. The iambic, elegiac, choric, and lyric poetry, from Archilochus downwards, all indicate purposes in the poet, and impressibilities of the hearers, very different from those of the ancient epic. In all of them the personal feeling of the poet and the specialties of present time and place, are brought prominently forward, while in the Homeric hexameter the poet is a mere nameless organ of the historical Muse—the hearers are content to learn, believe, and feel, the incidents of a foregone world, and the tale is hardly less suitable to one time and place than to another. The iambic metre (we are told) was first suggested to Archilochus by the bitterness of his own private antipathies; and the mortal wounds inflicted by his lampoons, upon the individuals against whom they were directed, still remain attested, though the verses themselves have perished. It was the metre (according to the well-known judgment of Aristotle) most nearly approaching to common speech, and well suited both to the coarse vein of sentiment, and to the smart and emphatic diction of its inventor.[1] Simonidês of Amorgus, the younger contemporary of Archilochus, employed the same metre, with less bitterness, but with an anti-heroic tendency not less decided. His remaining fragments present a mixture of teaching and sarcasm, having a distinct bearing upon actual life,[2] and carrying out the spirit which partially appears in the Hesiodic Works and Days. Of Alkseus and Sapphô, though unfortunately we are compelled to speak of them upon
hearsay only, we know enough to satisfy us that their own personal sentiments and sufferings, their relations private or public
- ↑ Herat, de Art. Poet. 79:—
"Archilochum proprio rabies armavit lambo," etc.
Compare Epist i. 19, 23, and Epod. vi. 12; Aristot. Khetor. iii. 8, 7, and Poetic, c. 4—also Synesius de Somniis—(
Greek characters) (Alcæi Fragment. Halle, 1810, p. 205). Quintilian speaks in striking language of the power of expression manifested by Archilochus (x. 1, 60).
- ↑ Simonides of Amorgus touches briefly, but in a tone of contempt upon
the Trojan war—(Greek characters) (Simonid. Fragm. 8. p. 36. v. 118); he seems to think it absurd that so destructive a struggle should have taken place pro unâ mulierculâ," to use the phrase of M. Payne Knight.
