sunshine of royal favor. His voluptuous career was cut short by the assassination of Hipparchus, and he returned to Teos (repeopled during his absence), to be choked by a grape-seed at the advanced age of eighty-five-or, if we are to take the story figuratively, to fall a victim to his irrepressible love of the bottle.

A statue of a drunken old man on the Athenian acropolis kept alive in the minds of the people as well the graceful odes of Anacreon as his prevailing weakness. His friend Simonides wrote an epitaph to his memory, in which we catch a glimpse of the exciting whirl of pleasures that made up his existence :

"Bland mother of the grape! all-gladdening vine!
Teeming inebriate joy! whose tendrils bloom
Crisp-woven in winding trail, now green entwine
This pillar's top, this mount, Anacreon's tomb.
As lover of the feast, the untempered bowl,
While the full draught was reeling in his soul,
He smote upon the harp, whose melodies

Were tuned to girlish loves, till midnight fled;
Now, fallen to earth, embower him as he lies,

Thy purpling clusters blushing o'er his head:
Still be fresh dew upon the branches hung,

Like that which breathed from his enchanting tongue."

The name of Anacreon is attached to about sixty odes, but they are all probably from five hundred to a thousand years later than he. Yet, if they are not by his hand, they breathe his spirit. As a sample of these Anacreontics, we give a paraphrase of

CUPID AND THE BEE.

Young Cupid once a rose caressed,
And sportively its leaflets pressed.
The witching thing, so fair to view
One could not but believe it true,
Warmed, on its bosom false, a bee,
Which stung the boy-god in his glee.
Sobbing, he raised his pinions bright,
And flew unto the isle of light,

Where, in her beauty, myrtle-crowned,
The Paphian goddess sat enthroned.
Her Cupid sought, and to her breast
His wounded finger, weeping, pressed.
"O mother! kiss me," was his cry-
"O mother! save me, or I die;
A winged little snake or bee
With cruel sting has wounded me!”

The blooming goddess in her arms
Folded and kissed his budding charms;
To her soft bosom pressed her pride,
And then with truthful words replied:
"If thus a little insect thing

Can pain thee with its tiny sting,

How languish, think you, those who smart
Beneath my Cupid's cruel dart?

How fatal must that poison prove

That rankles on the shafts of Love!"

Simonides (556-467 B.C.), who brought into high repute the Doric or Choral School while he also composed in the Ionic dialect, was born in Ceos, an island of the Cyclades. He was one of a brilliant coterie of poets attracted to Athens by the munificence of Hipparchus; and after the assassination of the latter he withdrew to Thessaly, to find rich and powerful patrons there on whom to lavish his eulogies; for Simonides was the first poet that set a price upon his talents and turned his panegyrics into gold. He who, when small pay was of fered, disdained to celebrate a mule victorious in the race on the plea that it was an ass's daughter, when the price was raised found in the "child of thunder-footed steeds" no unfit subject for his facile Muse.

In connection with this rather unpoetical eye to business, we are told that once Simonides, having extolled in verse one of his Thessalian patrons, was refused more than half the promised price and referred for the balance to the gods Castor and Pollux, whose praises filled most of the poem. The Thessalian noble was still laughing at his ruse for evading payment, when Simonides was summoned from the room to speak

with two strangers. Hastening out, he found that they had vanished; but no sooner had he withdrawn from the apartment than the roof fell and killed all whom he had left there. Thus the twin deities discharged their indebtedness to the poet.

The evening of his days Simonides passed in Syracuse, the ornament of Hi'ero's court, the recipient of royal favors during his life, and at his death of the highest funeral honors. It was here that the poet, who was somewhat of a philosopher, confessed his inability to answer the question of the Syracusan monarch, "What is God?"

Simonides was remarkably successful in adapting the elegy to funeral songs and epitaphs, and thus embalming Grecian. heroism for the contemplation of future ages. He lived in the time of the Persian War, and commemorated its worthies. The tomb of the three hundred who fell at Thermopyla for the liberties of Greece bore this grand inscription from his pen: "Go, stranger, and tell the Lacedæmonians that we lie here in obedience to their laws." In his workshop the epigram was wrought to perfection. "The Simonidean tears" seemed to well up from the very depths of the heart. Among all the epigrammatists known to literature, none have excelled him whom Plato styled "the divine Simonides;" who was "the voice of Hellas-the genius of Fame, sculpturing with a pen of adamant, in letters of indelible gold, the achievements to which the whole world owes its civilization." Fifty-six times, the last time at the age of eighty, he bore away from all competitors the prize of poetry.

Besides dirges and epigrams, hymns, prayers, pœans, and processional odes, flowed from the prolific pen of Simonides. Long a chorus-teacher in the land of his birth, he was peculiarly fitted for the composition of solemn choral poetry. "The Lament of Danaë," his finest surviving work, is a noble specimen of the Greek lyric. It describes the Argive princess

set adrift with her child in an ark upon the stormy billows by her inhuman parent. Tenderly she folds the sleeping boy in her arms, and prays Father Zeus that like him the sea may sleep.

And cheeks bedewed, she stretched her arms of love
Toward Perseus: 'O my child,

What sorrow wrings my breast!
While thou art sunk so deep
In infancy's calm sleep;
Launched in this joyless ark,
Bronze-fastened, glimmering-dark,
Yet, pillowed on thy tangled hair,
Thou slumberest, nor dost care
For billows past thee bounding
Nor breezes shrilly sounding.

Laid in thy mantle red, sweet face, how fair!
Ah! but if Fear

Had aught of fear for thee,

Thou even to me

Wouldst turn thy tender ear.

But now I bid thee rest, my babe; sleep still!
Rest, O thou sea! Rest, rest, unbounded ill!
Zeus, Father, some relief, some change from thee!
Am I too bold? For his sake, pardon me!'"

EPITAPH ON THE NIECE OF HIPPARCHUS.
"Archedicè, the daughter of King Hippias,

Who in his time

Of all the potentates of Greece was prime,
This dust doth hide;

Daughter, wife, sister, mother, unto kings she was,
Yet free from pride."-HOBBES.

Pindar, the friend and pupil of Simonides, the greatest master of the Doric School, adorned the golden age of Grecian literature, and will there be considered as the representative of lyric poetry.

MINOR ELEGIAC AND IAMBIC POETS.

MIMNERMUS of Colophon (634-590 B.C.), the first to adapt the elegiac couplet to plaintive and erotic themes: he bewails the enslavement of his degenerate country by Lydia. Old age the terror of the poet; life without "the gold-haired goddess" of love not worth living; a characteristic saying of his," When the flower of youth is past, it is best to die at once; may death strike me at my sixtieth year."

SOLON, the Athenian lawgiver (638–559 B.C.), the first gnomic poet: embodied his moral maxims (gnomes) in elegiac verse: also a master of the martial elegy, as his famous "Salaminian Ode" shows. Plato declared that if Solon had devoted his genius to the Muses, Homer might not have stood alone in his glory.

THEOGNIS (583-495 B.C.), a noble of Meg'ara, who opposed the democratic faction, and was in consequence expelled from the state and deprived of his hereditary lands by the Commons. He sang his songs in elegiac verse. Distinguished also as a gnomic poet. The following thoughts are culled from among his sayings:-"Wealth is almighty."—"Easy among men is the practice of wickedness, but hard the method of goodness."-"No one descends to Hades with his riches, nor can he by paying ransom escape death."--"Prefer to live piously on small means to being rich on what is gotten unjustly.”

PHOCYL'IDES Of Miletus (550-490 B.C.), an Ionian gnomic poet whose didactic couplets, generally marked by sound

H

sense, sometimes breathing a worldly spirit, began with the introductory phrase," And this too is Phocylides'." The following are maxims of his :"First get your living, and then think of getting virtue."—" A small city set upon a rock and well-governed is better than all foolish Nineveh." XENOPH'ANES of Colophon (about 540 B.C.), founder of the Eleatic sect of philosophers: also an elegiac poet: condemns the effeminacy of his countrymen, and derides a prevailing preference for physical over intellectual culture.

THE SATIRISTS. SIMONIDES THE ELDER, of Amorgus (660 B.C.)," the Iambographer:" style flowing and polished: masterpiece, a satire on women- --"Even though they seem to be good, when one has got one she becomes a plague." HIP'PONAX of Ephesus (540 B.C.), the father of parody, and inventor of the choliambic measure, or limping iambic, in which the last foot was a spondee. He attacked the luxury and vice of his day, sparing neither friend nor relative; it is told that by his crushing satire a sculptor who had caricatured his ugly person was driven to suicide. It was Hipponax who said: "Woman gives two days of happiness to man, the day of her bridal and the day of her funeral." The stranger who passed his tomb was warned:

"Wake not the sleeping wasp, for

though he's dead,

Still straight and sure his crooked lines are sped."