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among the public deliverers of song at the Grecian festivals; but that they were ever pitted against each other in party spirit as Homerists and Hesiodists, there is not a tittle of historical evidence to render probable. It is one thing to suppose that Hesiod may have had his peculiar admirers, reciters, and imitators, and another thing to imagine his school at Delphi setting up in opposition to the Homeridæ, and disputing with them for the palm of popularity. Wolffe has shewn that the Homeric rhapsodists themselves repeated and imitated Hesiod, which looks like any thing in the world but the Homeric and Hesiodic rhapsodists having split into contending sectaries.

True it is that Hesiod's epic taste degenerates from Homer's, and that the later rhapsodists who imitated Hesiod, although they might recite Homer also and call themselves Homeridæ, are to be widely distinguished from the old and patriarchal Homeride of Chios. These, namely, the elder rhapsodists, were either the composers or preservers of the Iliad and Odyssey. They gave the world materials which were capable of being moulded by future diascevasts into grand and interesting poems. Hesiod had also his diascevasts, but he has evidently a dry and inharmonious epic character, that would have baffled their efforts to all eternity if they had laboured to compile his works into an animated whole. That the degeneracy of the Hesiodic period, however, was produced by any systematic competition of an anti-Homeric school, is a theory which rests rather infirmly on the basis of the Heliconian tripod.

After Hesiod, and certainly long after Homer, commenced a suite of poets who have been collectively denominated the Cyclic †, who inundated Greece with epic, or at least with historic hexameter verse. Every event alluded to by Homer and Hesiod, and every fable of mythology, became the subject of a poem, till a tissue of versified narrative was at length accomplished by successive hands, which extended from the creation of things to the return of the heroes from Troy and from Chaos to Penelope's bed-chamber. However instructive this Cyclic register of Centaur campaigns, Titan insurrections, and heroic sieges, older than even the Trojan, might have been to an ancient Greek, a recital of the title of the lost poems which composed it would scarcely be amusing to a modern reader. If he should, however, feel any cúriosity on the subject of the Cyclic poets, his longings may be satisfied in Heyné's First Excursus to the second book of the Æneid. Of the middle epos of Greece, that is of the epic poetry written after Hesiod and before the age of Alexander, we have certainly no data for forming either an universal or perfectly confident judgment. But the silence of Aristotle as to its merits is an unpropitious symptom. Pausanias, it is true, speaks of verses of that period that had been mistaken for Homer's. But of the three most distinguished and later classical epic poets, Pisanders, who rehearsed the toils of Hercules, is ac

* Wolffii Prolegg. ad Hom. p. xcviii.

+ The term Cyclic has been variously and vaguely applied by the ancients and by classical antiquarians. It is sometimes taken to designate a selection of the best epic poets, made by the Alexandrian critics, which included Homer, Hesiod, Pisander, Panyasis, and Antimachus.

Or, more strictly speaking, to the death of Ulysses.

§ Pisander, of Camirus, in Rhodes, the very old Greek epic poet mentioned by Aristotle, who sang the labours of Hercules, and who first took the liberty of investing the hero with the club and costume of a lion's skin: this Pisander is to be

cused of having been totally without the beauty of epic design; and if a fragment supposed to be his, be rightly ascribed to him, it will prove him to have possessed no great excellence as a writer. Panyasis, the second of the post-Hesiodic classics, was ranked by some old critics next in merit to Homer; but the word next admits of an indefinitely imaginable interval. Handel's bellows-blower thought his services the next to Handel's in musical utility to the church. The works of Antimachus †, the last of the classic epics, a younger contemporary of Plato, were extant in the time of Hadrian, who preferred him to Homer himself. But his imperial majesty was fond of the tumid and obscure. Antimachus's audience, all but Plato, once left him whilst he was reading his verses; and the poet declared that Plato was a sufficient audience. The philosopher's remaining, however, might be the result of politeness or patience as much as of taste, and may almost be suspected to indicate that Antimachus's poetry required a considerable stock of philosophy to be heard to an end.

If even Pisander and Antimachus, who by all accounts soared, like eagles above a rookery, beyond the commonplace of Greek Cyclic poetry, were defective in epic harmony, i. e. in interesting arrangement of parts, it is but fair to suppose that the bulk of those Cyclics were mere chroniclers in verse. Hesiod himself betrays the commencement of an historical, and even a chronicling spirit in Greek poetry, like that which pervaded our own for ages both before and after Chaucer. Hesiod's inquisitiveness into remote events, and his love of accumulating legends, gave rise to this bad taste; and his beauties seem to have beguiled the Greeks to endure and adopt it. For dry as he is in detail, he still throws some poetical light and colouring on subjects of awful and mysterious attraction to untutored minds. He traced the secrets of nature back to their imagined source. He epitomized the history of man. distinguished from another poet of the same name, who lived centuries later in the reign of the Roman Emperor Alexander. The latter Pisander is also ranked under the vague denomination of a Cyclic poet. He was in all probability an imitator of Virgil. Macrobius, chamberlain to the emperor Theodosius, when he wrote his Saturnalia, appears to have confounded the new and the old Pisander, for he accuses Virgil of copying the latter. Now this could not be the case, for Aulus Gellius has carefully enumerated the writers imitated by Virgil, and never mentions the name of the old Pisander. Indeed there is a great deal of matter in the second Eneid which Macrobius alleges Virgil to have taken from the old Greek epic, which the elder Pisander could not have known. Any one who peruses Merrick's introduction to his edition and translation of Tryphiodorus's Destruction of Troy, will see it clearly made out, from the collated opinions of the learned, that Macrobius must have been mistaken on this point, however respectable his general authority may be.

Viz. a fragment of a poem on the Exploits of Hercules, published among the works of Theocritus, but evidently no production of the Sicilian school.

The fragments that remain of Antimachus of Colophon amount to about one hundred; but, alas, about three fourths of these fragments are but single verses, and the remainder not much longer. He flourished about the 92d Olympiad. The Alexandrian critics seem to have thought very well of him. Quinctilian, though he censures him, speaks of him as a strong writer. The works which it seems most certain that he wrote, were an epic poem on the Siege of Thebes, and a poem in elegiac verse on the Fate of distinguished Heroes who had experienced adversities in Love. It was called Lyde, in honour of a beauty to whom he was attached. The honourable mention of him made by Callimachus, is the most favourable symptom of Antimachus's genius, which, according to his censurers, was prone to obscurity. On the whole, his learning and power give us an idea of a poet not unlike our own Ben Jonson. Callini Epigr. Brunck. Anal. 461.

He touched very deeply the chord of curiosity in the human breast. What he told the Greeks appears a dream to us, but it was matter of fact and faith to them; and Greece appears to have forgot his faults in gratitude for his imparting what the multitude (at least) probably thought to be profound knowledge.

The history of Greek epic poetry from Hesiod down to the age of Alexander, thus supplies us only with fragments, and titles, and materials for conjecture. Its history after that period shall be the subject of a separate part of these Lectures. In the mean time, I shall revert to a general view of the poetical literature that preceded the Alexandrian school.

Mock-heroic Poetry.-The Greeks were fond of all sorts of parodies, and particularly of those on Homer. An epic or tragic passage, happily and comically imitated, would set the Athenian theatre in a roar and even such philosophers as Plato and Diogenes are said to have amused themselves with parodying Homer t. It is absurd to consider parodies as a mark of contempt. They may be ill-natured, but they are not necessarily so. One may laugh very heartily at the journeyman conspirator in our own Tragedy for Warm Weather, addressing the conclave of master-tailors in the words of Othello, " my very worthy and approved good masters," without the slightest disparagement to Shakspeare. The taste among the Greeks for parodies that could be enjoyed by the people at large in a theatre, marks their entire familiarity with their best poets; though perhaps it also indicates a shrewd and gay spirit, unlike the romantic feelings of an age of great epic poetry.

It would still, however, be more desirable to possess one authentic mock-heroic of the genuine Attic school, than a hundred works of the serious body of Cyclic poetry. The extant fragments of this burlesque kind of Greek humour are unhappily few and unsatisfactory. Only one of them amounts to an hundred lines, and most of them are exceedingly short. Among the short ones preserved by Athenæus, there is the scrap of an Homerically described contest between a barber and a potter about the wife of the former, whom the potter wished unjustly to carry away from him. The man of pots is called Pelides, in punning allusion to the Greek word for clay, and the barber also plays upon the similarity of the Greek term for a damsel and for his own vocation. The only considerable fragment of this kind in Athenæus is Matron's description of an Athenian supper. It begins thus-

"The suppers many and most sumptuous
Which Xenocles, the orator at Athens,

Gave us, O Muse, rehearse-for I went thither,
And hunger huge went with me. There we hail'd
The mightiest and most beauteous loaves-more white
Than snow, and sweet to taste as frumenty;
Whose smell would have beguil'd the northern wind
To stop his course, and breathe enamour'd on them.
Matron our host review'd the ranks of men,

* Aristotle, in his Poetics, calls Hegemon the inventor of parodies. Polemo,Athenæus, and others, speak of Hipponax, a much older poet, (the witty satirist who was chased from Ephesus for making too free with its tyrants,) as the earliest parodist. Possibly Aristotle only meant that Hegemon was the first writer who brought parodies on the stage. +Fabricius, vol. i. p. 550. Ed. Harles, 1790.

I of course exclude the mock-heroic Battle of the Frogs and Mice, which is ascribed, as I have already mentioned, by the best judges, to the school of Alexandria.

Strode to the threshold to receive his guests,
And halted there. Beside him Chærephon,-
Toad-eater, waited, like a hungry sea-mew,
Skilful to gorge on suppers not his own.
Then came the cooks, and loaded well each table-
The cooks to whom the kitchen's heaven belongs,
With all its turnspit hours, and privilege

To hasten or delay sweet supper-time."

Didactic Poetry.-The Greeks abounded also in didactic poetry. From the accounts and relics of this body of their literature we may gather, that it comprehended religious, moral, and physiological instruction. Probably it for the most part united them; although we find works mentioned by Plato* which must have been didactic poems, of an expressly religious nature, namely, for the direction of sacrifices and purifications. These were evidently the compositions of priests; and whatever philosophy they contained must have been mystic. Indeed both the religion and early philosophy of Greece were deeply infected with mysticism. But still there are traces of very old and simple moral poetry in Greece, calculated to instruct the people in the plain and practical duties of life. Tradition assigns much of this Gnomic poetry to statesmen and philosophers; and we cannot doubt of such public characters having delivered their precepts in verse, whatever we may think of the authenticity of verses ascribed to particular sages. Nor can we wonder that moral proverbs should have been put into verse, when infant science and law itself were tuned to numbers. For, ludicrous as it would be to us to hear of the Statutes at large being set to music, yet the laws of Charondas were publicly sung at the primitive banquets of the Athenians.

The chief of the Gnomic poets were Solon, Theognis, Phocylides, and Pythagoras. The largest extant Gnomic reliques are those ascribed to Theognis, which are obviously a farrago of moral sentences from many different writers, without connexion or consistency of parts. The supposed speaker of the sentiments even changes his existence, and on one occasion exclaims, "I am a beautiful mare," without deigning to account for his metamorphosis into a quadruped. The greater part of the lines ascribed to Phocylides are also palpable fabrications, and the pious forger has even helped the old Pagan bard to speak like a good Christian about the resurrection. The golden verses of Pythagoras do honour to heathen morality, and may be believed to be classically old, though their having come from Pythagoras himself is at least apocryphal. Empedocles of Agrigentum seems to have been the first poet of the language who gave its didactic poetry a magnificent and systematic form. He is, unhappily, among the lost writers: since even of his few fragments the whole are not authentic. But his name stands pre-eminent in the history of ancient philosophy and philosophical poetry. His great work on the Nature of things was the object of Cicero's admiration and of Lucretius's ardent, and probably imitative regard. "Carmina divini pectoris ejus (says Lucretius) Vociferantur et exponunt præclara reperta, Ut vix humanâ videatur sorte creatus.”

The numbers rolling from his breast divine

Reveal such bold and bright discoveries
That scarce he seems a soul of human birth.

* Plato de Rep. t. vi. p. 221.

Like many other wonderful proficients in early science, he acquired the reputation of a magician who could appease the winds and re-animate the dead. It is amusing to find antiquaries, of no very distant date, labouring to exculpate Empedocles from this heavy charge on his memory. In my next Lecture I shall finish this synopsis of the classes of Greek poetry.

LINES WRITTEN IN SICKNESS.

O DEATH! if there be quiet in thine arms,
And I must cease, gently, oh! gently come
To me, and let my soul learn no alarms,
But strike me, ere a shriek can echo, dumb,
Senseless and breathless :-And thou, sickly Life,
If the decree be writ that I must die,
Do thou be guilty of no needless strife,
Nor pull me downwards to mortality,
When it were fitter I should take a flight;
To-whither?-Holy Pity, hear, oh! hear,
And lift me to some far-off skiey sphere,
Where I may wander in celestial light!—
Might it be so, then would my spirit fear
To quit the things I have so loved when seen,
The air, the pleasant sun, the summer green,
Knowing how few would shed one common tear
Or keep in mind that I had ever been?

C.

FRAGMENT FROM MY POCKET-BOOK.

FAIR Moon, beneath thy midnight look it was
My story took its birth; therefore to thee,
To thee and her whose shape doth ever pass
Across my sight (as a faint melody

Heard in gone times doth still salute the ear
With its dumb song) this verse I dedicate;
To thee and her as fair as thee, and young

As thou wast when thy bright way thou didst steer
Through clouds that o'er the Latmian forests hung,
Be this my latest story consecrate.

C.

DISCONTENT.

THE mariner whose little bark is toss'd
Upon the rude ungovernable waves,

'Midst rocks and quicksands, often toils and 'slaves,
Uncertain if he shall, or not be lost,

And buried in the mighty deep he cross'd

So often and so safe-in vain he craves

Assistance, whilst the foaming ocean laves

His labouring vessel-thoughts which once engress'd
And cheer'd his brighter days, are now forgot,

Or, if remember'd, tend to aggravate

The dreadful scene-" How wretched is my lot!"
He cries:-the danger o'er, he tempts his fate

Again. Thus weak repining man doth sigh,
And discontented lives, yet fears to die.

W.

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