THE INDO-EUROPEAN FAMILY OF LANGUAGES.

Linguistic Map of Europe

ILLUSTRATED HISTORY
OF
ANCIENT LITERATURE
ORIENTAL AND CLASSICAL

BY
JOHN D. QUACKENBOS, A.M., M.D.
ADJUNCT PROFESSOR OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND
LITERATURE, COLUMBIA COLLEGE

ACCOMPANIED WITH
ENGRAVINGS AND COLORED MAPS

NEW EDITION
REVISED AND CORRECTED

NEW YORK
HARPER & BROTHERS, PUBLISHERS
1890

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1878, by
JOHN D. QUACKENBOS,
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
Copyright, 1889, by John D. Quackenbos.

The History of Literature, as a separate branch of the history of civilization, is of comparatively recent origin; the first work on the subject in any language dating no further back than the sixteenth century, and being little more than a crude catalogue of authors and their books. Yet who can deny the great importance of such history? When studied in connection with illustrative extracts from the masterpieces of which it treats, it furnishes a key to the intellectual development of our race, introduces us to the great minds that stand as beacon lights in successive ages, and with their wisdom widens the scope of knowledge, while it refines the taste and disciplines the judgment. Lord Bacon said but the truth, when he remarked that the history of the world without the history of letters would be as incomplete as a statue of Polyphemus deprived of his single eye.

Nor is this study without results of a direct practical bearing. Certainly all must appreciate the importance of understanding current allusions to the writers and literary works of other ages and countries, and must admit that some acquaintance at least with such writers and works is essential to a well-grounded knowledge of one’s own language and a correct estimate of its literature. But when is such an acquaintance to be obtained, if not during a school or college course? The engrossing duties of after-life leave little time for the pursuit of liberal studies. And how is such an acquaintance to be obtained? All are not linguists, and the greater part must get it second-hand—must avail themselves of the labors of others who have delved in these unfamiliar fields.

It is to facilitate and popularize this study of general literature by furnishing a complete and carefully condensed text-book on the subject, unencumbered by obscure names and wearisome details, that the volume now offered to the public has been prepared. It presents a full account of the literatures of ancient nations, and, treating of the origin and relationships of their respective languages, incidentally brings forward some of the most interesting facts of Comparative Philology. While the writings of Greece and Rome receive due attention, a new, and, it is believed, peculiarly valuable feature of the book will be found in its treatment of ancient Oriental literature—particularly the Sanscrit and Persian. The labors of European scholars during the last quarter-century have thrown a chain of living interest around the subject, and awakened on this side of the Atlantic as well a thirst for further knowledge, which it is here attempted to satisfy. The[Pg vi] principles of Egyptian writing are also explained; and the literary treasures recently unearthed amid the ruins of the Nile Valley and elsewhere are described and illustrated.

In treating the subject the author has aimed, while giving a clear outline of each literature as a whole, to make its great writers stand out in bold relief, and to associate them in the pupil’s mind with the works that have made them immortal. With this view brief biographies, not fragmentary or isolated, but grafted on the narrative where they naturally belong, are accompanied with short specimens, carefully selected to give the best idea of each author’s style and genius. In the critical views as well as the historical facts presented, the latest authorities have been followed, and the aid of maps and illustrations has been freely resorted to for the better elucidation of points on which they could throw light.

The present volume has grown out of the author’s experience in the lecture-room; and in the belief that it is of a scope and grade that will meet the popular want, he now offers it to high-schools, academies, and colleges. From such institutions he feels that no class should graduate in ignorance either of the Greek and Roman classics which have inspired the modern poet and philosopher, or of those precious remains of once great Oriental literatures that patient scholars of the nineteenth century have brought to light—that helped to shape the Greek mind itself in the morning of the world. He trusts that it may foster in the young admiration of the brilliant thoughts that sparkle in the pages of ancient lore, a love of literature, and a taste for philological investigations.

Columbia College, June, 1878.

In order that the friends of this popular work on Ancient Literature may be advised of the progress made in philological study during the present decade, the author has thoroughly revised the text, diagrams, and maps. The value of the revision is enhanced by the introduction of a carefully selected bibliography; frequent references to standard monographs—not made to supply omissions, but as guides to those who may desire a full and authoritative course of collateral reading—are incorporated in the narrative. Attention is especially directed to the chapter on Egyptian writing and literature, for which the author is extensively indebted to F. C. H. Wendel, Ph.D. (Strasburg). The results of the vast amount of labor expended in this most interesting and important field during the ten years that have elapsed since the issue of this text-book, are here for the first time given to English readers. Other specialists have materially aided the author in his work of revision. Acknowledgment is due to Dr. H. T. Peck, Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, and Dr. R. J. H. Gottheil, Professor of Syriac and Rabbinical Literature, Columbia College; to Drs. E. D. Perry and A. V. W. Jackson, instructors respectively in Sanscrit and Avesta, Columbia College; and to Dr. Chas. E. Moldehnke, the Egyptologist.

Columbia College, May 1, 1889.

INTRODUCTION.

(Pages 11-30.)

Definition and Divisions of Literature, page 11.—Origin and Relationship of Languages, 12.—The Aryans, 13.—Aryan Languages, 16.—Semitic Languages, 16.—Turanian Languages, 17.—Written Language, 18.—Ideographic Writing, 18.—Phonetic Writing, 19.—Modes of Writing and Pointing, 20.—Ancient Writing Materials, 21.—General View of Ancient Literature, 25.

PART I.

ANCIENT ORIENTAL LITERATURES.

Chapter I.—Hindoo Literature.

(Pages 31-60.)

Sanscrit Language, 31.—Sanscrit Alphabet, 32.—Sanscrit Researches, 33.—The Veda, 34.—The Upavedas, 35.—The Purânas, 35.—Social Life of the Vedic People, 37.—Code of Manu, 38.—Epic Poetry, 40.—The Râmâyana, 40.—The Mahâbhârata, 43.—Lyric and Didactic Poetry, 46.—Kalidâsa, 46.—Jayadeva, 48.—Gitagovinda, 49.—The Sanscrit Shakespeare, 50.—Sakoontalâ, 50.—The Hindoo Drama, 54.—Tales and Fables, 56.—History and Grammar, 57.—Buddhist Literature, 58.—Writing Materials of the Hindoos, 60.

Chapter II.—Persian Literature.

(Pages 60-67.)

Avesta Tongue, 60.—Zoroaster, 61.—The Avesta, 62.—Avesta Philosophy, 63.—Persian Inscriptions, 65.—Rock of Behistun, 65.—The Royal Library, 67.[Pg viii]

Chapter III.—Chinese Literature.

(Pages 67-83.)

Chinese Language, 67.—Chinese Writing, 68.—Antiquity of Chinese Literature, 69.—Confucius, 70.—The Chinese Classics, 73.—The Four Shoo, 77.—The Confucian Analects, 77.—Mencius, 79.—Spirit of the Chinese Classics, 80.—Lao-Tse, 82.

Chapter IV.—Hebrew Literature.

(Pages 83-104.)

The Semitic Languages and their Distribution, 84.—The Ancient Hebrew, 85.—Hebrew Alphabet, 86.—Spirit of Hebrew Poetry, 88.—Parallelism, 89.—Dawn of Hebrew Literature, 90.—The Books of Moses, 90.—The Historical Books, 92.—The Book of Job, 93.—Golden Age of Hebrew Poetry, 93.—The Psalms, 93.—Elegiac Poetry, 94.—Didactic Poetry, 95.—Prophetic Poetry, 96.—Silver Age, 97.—The Apocrypha, 99.—The Talmud, 100.

Chapter V.—Chaldean, Assyrian, Arabic, and Phœnician Literatures.

(Pages 104-117.)

Cuneiform Letters, 104.—Assyrio-Babylonian Writing Materials, 106.—Golden Age of Babylonian Literature, 107.—Deluge Tablets, 112.—Arabic Literature, 114.—Himyaritic Inscriptions, 114.—Phœnician Literature, 115.—Carthaginian Relics, 116.

Chapter VI.—Egyptian Literature.

(Pages 117-131.)

Egyptian Language, 118.—The Rosetta Stone, 119.—Hieroglyphic Writing, 120, 121.—Archaic Age of Egyptian Literature, 122.—Classical Age, 123.—Memoirs of Saneha, 124.—Tale of Snake Island, 125.—Minstrel’s Song, 126.—Golden Age, 126.—Book of the Dead, 126,127.—Hymns, 128.—Epic Poetry, 129.—Authorship, 130.

PART II.

GRECIAN LITERATURE.

Chapter I.—Birth of Grecian Literature.

(Pages 133-138.)

Early Settlement of Greece, 133.—Pelasgi and Hellenes, 134.—The Greek Language, 135.—Earliest Forms of Poetry, 137.—Legendary Poets, 138.[Pg ix]

Chapter II.—Age of Epic Poetry.

(Pages 139-156.)

Homer, 139.—The Iliad, 141.—The Odyssey, 147.—Minor Poems of Homer, 150.—Cyclic Poets, 152.—Hesiod and his Works, 152.—Poets of the Epic Cycle, 156.

Chapter III.—Lyric Poetry.

(Pages 157-178.)

Rise and Varieties of Lyric Poetry, 157.—Callinus, 159.—Tyrtæus, 160.—Archilochus, 161.—Æolic and Doric Schools, 163.—Alcæus, 164.—The Lesbian Poetesses, 164.—Sappho, 165.—Sappho’s Pupils, 171.—Anacreon, 172.—Simonides, 174.—Minor Lyric Poets, 177.

Chapter IV.—Rise of Greek Prose.

(Pages 178-184.)

Earliest Prose Writings, 178.—The Seven Sages, 179.—Solon, 179.—Thales, 180.—Æsop, 181.—Progress of Greek Prose, 182.—Early Philosophers and Historians, 183.

Chapter V.—Golden Age of Grecian Literature.

(Pages 184-262.)

The Attic Period, 184.—Pindar, 185.—Antimachus, 192.—Dramatic Poetry, 192.—Æschylus, 194.—“Prometheus Chained,” 196.—Sophocles, 200.—“King Œdipus,” 202.—Euripides, 207.—“Medea,” 209.—Greek Comedy, 212.—Aristophanes, 213.—“The Clouds,” 214.—“The Birds,” 219.—History, 221.—Herodotus, 222.—Thucydides, 225.—Xenophon, 229.—Ctesias and Theopompus, 233.—Philosophy, 234.—The Ionic and Italic Schools, 234.—Pythagoras, 235.—Empedocles, 236.—Xenophanes, 237.—Democritus, 237.—School of Epicurus, 238.—Pyrrho, the Skeptic, 238.—The Socratic School, 239.—Plato and the Academic School, 241.—“Phædo,” 244.—Aristotle and the Peripatetic School, 247.—Aristotle’s Writings, 248.—Theophrastus, 252.—The Stoic School, 253.—The Cynics, 254.—Oratory, 255.—Demosthenes, 256.—The Speech “On the Crown,” 257.—Æschines, 260.

Chapter VI.—The Alexandrian Period.

(Pages 262-280.)

Decline of Letters, 262.—The New Comedy, 263.—Menander, 264.—Philemon, 265.—Pastoral Poetry, 266.—Theocritus, 266.—Bion and Moschus, 269.—The Museum, 272.—The Alexandrian Library, 273.—Poetry at Alexandria, 274.—Callimachus, 274.—Apollonius Rhodius, 275.—Writers on Science, 276.—Critics and Grammarians, 277.—History, 277.—Polybius, 278.—The Septuagint, 279.

Chapter VII.—Later Greek Literature.

(Pages 230-302.)

Decay of Greek Genius, 280.—Writers of the First Century B.C., 281.—Writers[Pg x] of the First Three Christian Centuries, 284.—Plutarch, 285.—Lucian, 288.—Pausanias, 292.—Origen, 293.—Neo-Platonism, 293.—Longinus, 294.—Athanasius and Chrysostom, 294.—Novel writers, 295.—Hierocles, 295.—Byzantine Literature, 297.—The Greek Anthology, 297.—Gems of Greek Thought, 300.

PART III.

ROMAN LITERATURE.

Chapter I.—Latin and its Oldest Monuments.

(Pages 303-307.)

Italy Peopled, 303.—The Latin Language, 304.—Ancient Latin Relics, 305.

Chapter II.—Dawn of Roman Literature.

(Pages 307-329.)

Indebtedness of Rome to Greek Authors, 307.—The Roman Drama, 308.—Livius Andronicus, 309.—Cneius Nævius, 310.—Ennius, 311.—Plautus, 312.—“The Captives,” 313.—Terence, 315.—“The Self-Tormentor,” 317.—Decline of the Drama, 319.—Epic Poetry, 320.—Nævius and Ennius as Epic Poets, 320.—Satiric Poetry, 322.—Lucilius, 323.—Early Latin Prose, 324.—Cato the Censor, 324.—Lælius, Scipio, and the Gracchi, 326.—Antonius, Crassus, and Hortensius, 327.—Minor Historians and Orators, 328.

Chapter III.—Golden Age of Roman Literature.

(Pages 329-388.)

Periods of the Golden Age, 329.—Cicero, 330.—Varro, 337.—Julius Cæsar, 339.—Sallust, 343.—Cornelius Nepos, 347.—Poets of the Ciceronian Period, 348.—Lucretius, 348.—Catullus, 352.—Poetry of the Augustan Age, 354.—Virgil, 355.—Virgil’s Eclogues, 359.—Georgics, 360.—Æneid, 362.—Horace, 369.—Varius, 375.—Tibullus, 375.—Propertius, 377.—Ovid, 379.—Prose Writers of the Augustan Age, 382.—Livy, 382.

Chapter IV.—Age of Decline.

(Pages 388-428.)

Silver Age of Roman Letters, 388.—Velleius Paterculus, 389.—Valerius Maximus, 389.—Celsus, 390.—Phædrus, 390.—Persius, 392.—Seneca, 394.—Lucan, 397.—Pliny the Elder, 401.—Martial, 404.—Statius, 405.—Sulpitia, 406.—Quintilian, 407.—Juvenal, 408.—Tacitus, 412.—Suetonius, 415.—Pliny the Younger. 418.—Apuleius, 420.—Latin Fathers, 421.—Specimens of Later Latin Poetry, 423.—Gems of Latin Thought, 425.

Literature, in its broadest sense, comprises the written productions of all nations in all ages. It is the permanent expression of the intellectual power of man, and reflects the popular manners, the political condition, the moral and religious status. In its literary productions, a nation bequeaths to posterity an ever-speaking record of its inner life.

The history of literature traces the progress of the human mind from age to age, by landmarks erected by the mind itself. It represents the development of different phases of thought in written language, and shows their influence in moulding the public taste and morals. It investigates the connection between the literatures of different countries, considers the causes of their growth and their decay, and critically examines the works of individual authors.

Literature may be divided into two parts, Ancient and Modern. The former, to which this volume is devoted, includes the literatures of the ancient Oriental nations, the Greeks, and the Romans. To the second division belong the literatures of modern Europe, of the modern Oriental nations, and of America.

After considering the origin and relationship of languages,[Pg 12] we shall give a brief summary of the history of ancient literature as a whole, without national divisions; so that the reader, having previously followed the progress of letters from age to age and people to people, may be enabled to study more intelligently the separate literatures of the different countries.

ORIGIN AND RELATIONSHIP OF LANGUAGES.

The Dawn of History.—When the mist that envelops the early history of the world first rises, it discovers to our view, in parts of western Asia, communities more or less advanced in knowledge and the arts, gathered about certain centres of civilization; and others, of less culture, leading a wandering life, spent mostly, we may conjecture, in the chase, in predatory excursions, and the tending of herds. We find at this time a thrifty race, called Aryans (är’yanz), settled in the district between the Hindoo Koosh Mountains and the upper course of the Amoo—the ancient Bactria (part of what is now Turkestan and Afghanistan; see Map, p. 15). The region watered by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris was occupied by the forefathers of the Chaldeans and Assyrians, the Jews and Arabians; while over the plains of Tartary, known as Turan, wandering tribes were spread—whence their name, Turanians, swift horsemen. Corresponding with these three divisions of the human race are three distinct families of languages,—the Aryan or Indo-European, the Semitic, and the Turanian,—embracing more than one hundred and fifty tongues. (See Rawlinson’s “The Origin of Nations.”)

In Africa, also, civilization was a plant of early growth, Egypt ranking among the most ancient monarchies. Europe, however, in these primeval ages, was either a tenantless wilderness or the home of rude adventurers like the Lapps and Finns, of whom the Basques in the Pyrenees are perhaps the only remnants in the west.

[Pg 13]

THE ARYANS.

The Aryans have left no account of themselves sculptured on rocks or the walls of crumbling temples; but by careful study of the languages of Aryan origin we obtain, after the lapse of four thousand years, a glimpse of the social condition of those who spoke the mother-tongue among the mountains of Bactria. We infer that nouns similar in the various derived languages,—as father (protector), brother (helper), house, door, walls, boat, grain, etc.,—are the names of objects or notions familiar to the original family.[1] Thus utilizing language as a key to what would otherwise be locked up in the unknown past, we learn that the inhabitants of the fertile Bactrian valleys were devoted to agricultural pursuits. Tilling the ground was an honorable employment, the very name Aryan signifying high-born, noble. We have pictured to us law-abiding communities, grouped together in towns, ruled by chiefs and a king, recognizing family ties, entertaining exalted conceptions of woman, and a solemn regard for the marriage bond—the latter always a mark of high civilization.

Language also tells us that this interesting people preferred the arts of peace to war. With the dog for his companion, the shepherd folded his flocks of sheep; with the horse and ox for his servants, the landholder broke the soil with a plough of bronze. Pigs and fowls were raised; cattle formed the chief wealth; and the cows were milked by the daughter of the household—this name meaning milk-maid.

The Aryan drove from village to village in his wheeled car[Pg 14]riage, over well-constructed roads; worked the metals; plied the loom; moulded clay into pottery; and even navigated the neighboring waters in boats propelled by oars. He gave names to numbers as far as one hundred, was familiar with the principles of decimals, and took the moon for his guide in dividing the year into months.

A Supreme Being was worshipped in Bactria, the Great Unseen, the Creator and Governor of the world. In the reference to him of controversies that were difficult to settle, we trace the origin of the later trial by ordeal. Even some of our commonest stories are derived from fables current at least two thousand years B.C. in ancient Arya.

Aryan Migrations.—Few in number at first, the Aryans long lived peaceably together. But as the population grew denser, great bodies, either compelled to search for food in other lands or moved by a thirst for exploration, broke away at different periods from the cradle of their race, in quest of new abodes.

Among these emigrants were Teutonic, Lithuanian, and Slavonian hordes, who pushed to the northwest, and became the ancestors of the Scandinavian and German nations, the Letts, Russians, and Poles. The Celts and Græco-Italic tribes, probably passing between the Caspian Sea and the Black, made their way by different routes into the fertile regions of southern and southwestern Europe. The Slavs, Teutons, and Celts, appear to have dispossessed an indigenous population of supposed Turanian origin.[2] Of the Aryans who migrated to the northwest, Max Müller says that they “have been the prominent actors in the great drama of history, and have carried to their fullest growth all the elements of active[Pg 15] life with which our nature is endowed. They have perfected society and morals. They have become, after struggles with Semitic and Turanian races, the rulers of history; and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilization, commerce, and religion.”

ORIGINAL HOME of the ARYAN TRIBES
with their ROUTES OF MIGRATION.

After the last emigration of Aryans to the west, the parent community extended its settlements southward into the Tableland of Iran (érahn) (modern Persia, Afghanistan, and Beloochistan; see Map), and finally, in consequence of a religious difference, separated into two great branches. One remained on the Iranian plateau, and was ultimately known in history as the Medes and Persians. The other made its way through[Pg 16] the mountain-passes, crossed the upper Indus (at some uncertain date, between 2000 and 1400 B.C.), and in time effected the conquest of the rich peninsula of Hindostan. The invaders were the “fair-complexioned” Indo-Aryans, who spoke the polished Sanscrit, and among whom sprung up the institution of caste and many gross superstitions.

Aryan Languages.—Similarity in the words and grammatical structure of their languages proves that the Hindoos, the Persians, the Greeks and Romans, the Celtic races, the Slavonian and Teutonic nations,—all had a common origin; that the frozen Icelander and Indian fire-worshipper, the outcast Gypsy and the plaided Highlander, the English master and his Cooley servant, are brothers of the same stock. Their tongues have been derived from the same parent—a language full of poetic grandeur, older than Greek or Sanscrit, and containing the germs of both—a language which has perished.

Spoken as we have seen from India to the west of Europe, these tongues have been called Indo-European. They embrace the dialects of India and Persia; the Welsh, and the Celtic of Scotland and Ireland; the Latin and its derivatives, the Romance languages, viz., Italian, Spanish, French, etc.; Greek; Russian and Polish; English, German, Danish, and Swedish (see diagram preceding the title-page).

Some philologists hold that the primitive home of the Indo-European race cannot be determined, and incline to the opinion that the Asiatic representatives of the family emigrated from Europe into Asia. (Consult Brugman’s “Elements of the Comparative Grammar of the Indo-Germanic Languages,” p. 2.)

THE SEMITES.

The Semitic Languages, in like manner, may all be traced to a common source. To this group belong the Syriac, the Hebrew, the Arabic, the Ethiopic, the ancient Phœnician, and the Carthaginian; while the cuneiform inscriptions of Bab[Pg 17]ylonia and Assyria are the written characters of a Semitic tongue common to those countries. (See Chart, p. 85.)

Philology has not followed the Semites to a home as limited as that of the Aryans; though tradition points to Armenia as their early domicile, ethnological science to Arabia or Africa. It declares, however, the Semitic and the Aryan to be distinct forms of speech, perhaps branches of a common stem, but neither derivable from the other.

THE TURANIANS.

Turanian Dialects.—Here there is slighter evidence of relationship. The Turanian languages, though they seem to be members of the same original family, differ widely; for those who spoke them were nomads, wanderers over the globe, whose customs, laws, and dialects were modified with every change of habitation and condition. To this sporadic group belong the Mongolian tongues, the Turkish, Finnic, and Hungarian, together with certain Polynesian dialects; but the Chinese, Japanese, Australian, North American Indian, South African, and many others of the nine hundred languages spoken on the earth, bear hardly enough resemblance to these to be classed in the same family.

SYSTEMS OF WRITING.

Language is either spoken or written. Spoken language we find to have been used as a medium of communication between men in the earliest periods to which history carries us back. It is the expression of reason, and as such constitutes a line of demarcation between man and the lower animals. Without it, indeed, the brute can, to a certain extent, make known his emotions and desires. The house-dog, by the distinctive character of his bark, welcomes his master or threatens the intrusive stranger. The hen warns her chicks of danger by one set of signals, and calls them to feed by another.[Pg 18] The ant, discovering an inviting grain too heavy for itself alone, bears the intelligence to its fellows and promptly returns with aid. But such limited means of communication fall infinitely short of the perfect system which is exclusively man’s birthright—which uses articulate sounds to represent ideas, and combines them so as to express every shade of thought.

Written Language.—Spoken Language lives only for the moment; words uttered to-day die and are forgotten to-morrow. To give permanency to his passing thoughts, when advancing civilization showed such permanency to be desirable, man devised Writing, the art of representing ideas by visible characters. Written Language is the vehicle of literature—the material in which the thinker embodies his conceptions for future generations, just as the sculptor gives permanent forms to his ideals in marble, or the painter on the glowing canvas.

Writing is either Ideographic or Phonetic. The Ideographic System represents material objects directly, by pictures or symbols. The Phonetic System uses certain characters to express the articulate sounds by which such objects or notions are denoted, and thus indirectly, through the two media of sounds and characters, indicates the objects or notions themselves.

Ideographic Writing.—It has long been contended that the earliest method of conveying ideas was by means of pictorial images, and there is no reason for disputing such a theory. But this is not written language; it is mere thought-painting, or the representation of objects and actions by pictures, and may satisfy the wants of primitive races in conveying a limited amount of information. Thus the American Indians informed one another of the presence and movements of troops, or of engagements that had taken place, by means of pictures. The emblems employed were generally understood among the different tribes: e.g., a tree with human legs[Pg 19] stood for a botanist; and the figure of a man with two bars on the stomach and four across the legs, was a prescription ordering abstinence from food for two days, and rest for four. The original characters of the Egyptians and Chinese, of the cuneiform systems, and of the Aztecs, were, in like manner, mere pictures, and nothing more.

The test of a written language is its ability to express abstract thoughts by single signs or combinations of signs; in this direction, rude symbols are found utterly wanting. It may be that picture-drawing gave the first impulse to the invention of phonetic writing; yet the origin of such writing, with its gradual development, is as hidden from us as that of language itself. We are justified, however, in assuming that wherever we have history, we have also written language.

Phonetic Writing.—There are two systems of phonetic writing, the Syllabic and the Alphabetic. The characters of the former are used to represent syllables, or combinations of sounds (either words or parts of words) uttered by distinct impulses of the voice; those of the latter represent the elements of which these syllables are composed, or letters. History indicates that written language is always phonetic. In Egypt it is both syllabic and alphabetic; in Babylon, syllabic alone.

The characters by which the elementary sounds of any language are denoted, arranged in order, constitute its Alphabet. A perfect alphabet would be one in which every letter represented but one simple sound, and every simple sound was represented by but one letter—a perfection never yet attained.

It is to the Egyptians that the world is indebted for Alphabetic Writing. Their hieroglyphics were partly alphabetic, partly syllabic, and partly determinative, the latter, in the course of centuries, becoming word-signs or ideograms (see p. 120). From a modification of their alphabet employed by them in transliterating Semitic words and names, the Phœnician alphabet was derived. This modified alphabet, including[Pg 20] several syllabic signs, consisted of about thirty characters. It has been conjectured that Phœnicians, dwelling or trading in Egypt, saw the advantage of written language, and employed this transliteration alphabet to write their own tongue. All the modifications introduced by them are graphic in nature, and designed to simplify the original characters. It is further important to note that the Phœnician alphabet is not derived from the hieroglyphics, but from the second form of the hieratic (see p. 122, and table, p. 87, where the theory is illustrated). The Hittite hieroglyphics (p. 114) may be derived from the Egyptian; but other ancient Oriental alphabets, as the Babylonian, the Chinese, and perhaps the Sanscrit, were possibly independently invented and developed.

Such is the most probable account of the origin of letters. Tradition variously ascribes their invention to Thoth, an Egyptian god, to Cadmus of Phœnicia, to Odin the supreme deity of the Scandinavians, and to others. Of the varied exports of the Phœnicians, their alphabet was the most precious. Wherever their sails were spread, their letters were made known, and all nations sooner or later profited by this great Semitic invention. In the table on page 87 may be traced a decided resemblance between several of the Phœnician characters and the hieroglyphics in which they originated; also the successive changes by which they were modified in the earlier and later Greek and Latin letters—whence most of our English capitals. (See Taylor’s “The Alphabet.”)

Modes of Writing and Pointing.—As regards the direction in which their writing ran, ancient nations differed. In the Egyptian hieroglyphics there was no established order; but the figures of men and animals, facing the beginning of the lines, often gave a clue to the direction in which they were meant to be read. As a general rule, the Indo-Europeans wrote from left to right, the Semites from right to left. The Laws of Solon and other Greek writings of that period (about[Pg 21] 600 B.C.) appeared in lines running alternately from right to left and from left to right, as an ox walks in ploughing; this “ox-turning system” (boustrophedon), however, was soon followed by our present method. The Chinese, Japanese, and Mongols, wrote in columns, which were read from the top of the page, and from right to left. In the ancient Mexican pictographs, similar columns were read from the bottom.

The ancients did not separate sentences, or their subdivisions, with points; but wrote their words together, leaving the meaning to be deciphered from the context. Rings, ovals, or squares, were sometimes drawn around proper names, and words were occasionally separated by some device—a diagonal bar or wedge , as in ancient Persian inscriptions; or a letter placed on its side, as between the following words: CONJUGI KARISSIMAE. In a Roman inscription found near Bath, England, a small v occurs after every word: JULIUSvVITALISvFABRI. A peculiar sign was used, in some cases, immediately before the name of a god or of a person.

In the third century B.C., a system of punctuation, devised by Aristophanes, a grammarian of Alexandria, became known to the Greeks. It employed a dot (.), which had the force of our period, colon, or comma, according as it was placed after the top, middle, or bottom of the final word. The better system of modern times was not invented till the sixteenth century.

ANCIENT WRITING MATERIALS.

Stylus and Tablets.—The first writing was done on rocks with sharp-pointed instruments of iron or bronze, to record great events. Next came tracings on bricks of soft clay, afterward sun-dried or baked; and then writing with a metal or ivory stylus on sheets of lead or layers of wax, from which erasures could be made, if needful, with the flattened end of the instrument.

[Pg 22]

Pliny speaks of leaden sheets, thus inscribed, rolled up in a cylindrical form when not in use. But under provocation the metallic stylus could be employed as a dagger; and when a Roman schoolmaster was killed by his pupils with their styles and heavy table-books, the dangerous instrument was banished, and superseded by a similar one of horn. The early shepherds, we are told, imitated this mode of writing, making thorns or awls do duty as styles, and scratching their songs on leather straps which they wound round their crooks.

Wooden tablets, glazed to receive coloring matter, were used by the Jews and early Egyptians, and the former wrote also with a diamond-tipped stylus on stone or metallic tables. The Greeks and Romans sometimes wired their tablets of citron-wood, beech, or fir, together at the back, so as to allow them to open like a modern book.

Calamus, or Reed.—A great advance was made when the stylus gave way to camel’s hair brushes or reeds (calami) sharpened and split like our pens, and the tablets were replaced with papyrus and parchment. The reeds in common use came from Egypt, but persons of fortune often wrote with a silver calamus. The ink employed was thicker and more lasting than ours; sometimes prepared from the black fluid of the cuttle-fish, but generally from lampblack and glue, or from soot, rosin, and pitch.—Chalk pencils were at one time manufactured by the Egyptians and Greeks.

With the reed and ink, bark came into use as a cheap writing material; hence the Latin word for bark, liber, meant also book. Leaves, too, were employed for this purpose, particularly those of the palm—whence, perhaps, the leaf of a book was so called. But for manuscripts designed for permanent preservation, papyrus had the decided preference.

Egyptian Papyrus.

Papyrus, or the paper-plant, the bulrush of Scripture, grew in the marshes and pools of Egypt. Its branchless stem rose from five to ten feet above the water, and was sur[Pg 23]mounted by a cluster of long, spike-shaped, drooping leaves. This plant was woven into sandals, mats, clothing, and even boats; was eaten, raw and boiled; was manufactured into furniture; and was burned for fuel and light; when prepared for writing purposes, it was invaluable. The part under the water was selected, the outer bark removed, and the delicate white layers found beneath were pressed together into sheets and dried. These were written on with red and black ink, and some of them were elaborately ornamented with many-colored figures.

The finest papyrus was reserved for the priests, and never exported till they had used it. But the Romans, having invented a process for removing what was first written on it, imported it in large quantities; they also attempted its cultivation in the marshes of the Tiber, but without success. The Greeks did not use it extensively until the era of the Ptolemies.

Parchment was prepared from the skins of sheep and goats by polishing them with pumice-stone and then rubbing in fragrant oil. Its name, in Latin pergamena, would seem to indicate Pergamus in western Asia as the place of its origin; but centuries before that little kingdom became celebrated for its library of parchment volumes, this material, or something very like it, was known. Herodotus mentions[Pg 24] its use in his time; and the Jews, as a pastoral people familiar with the art of dressing skins, wrote their first books on a kind of leather.

Reading a Volumen, or Roll.

But if parchment was not invented at Pergamus, Eu’menes, king of that country, was certainly the first to make extensive use of it (175 B.C.). He had founded a splendid library, which he determined should eclipse that of Alexandria. In the reign of Ptolemy Epiph’anes, king of Egypt, it was sought to prevent the transcription of books for the rival library by prohibiting the exportation of papyrus. This obliged Eumenes to resort to parchment as a substitute. From Pergamus it spread to Europe, finally superseding all[Pg 25] other materials, and continuing in demand until the art of making paper cheaply from rags was invented toward the close of the Middle Ages.

Ancient manuscripts were put up in the form of rolls (volu’mina—whence volumes), made of sheets fastened together in a continuous strip, sometimes forty or fifty yards in length. This was wound round wooden cylinders, the ends of which were often set with jewels, or ornamented with knobs of ivory, silver, or gold. Titles were either suspended from these books like tags, or glued upon them as labels. An outside cover of parchment protected the scrolls, which, enclosed in cylindrical cases and placed horizontally on shelves ranged about a room, constituted an ancient library.

The Chinese, after writing for centuries, in common with their neighbors of India, on bark and dried palm-leaves, are believed to have discovered a process of preparing a pulp from cotton or bamboo, and to have manufactured it into paper as early as the commencement of our era. Perhaps, as observation of the silkworm spinning her cocoons led them to devise the art of weaving silk, they in like manner borrowed his cunning from the paper-making wasp, and thus early perfected an invention which has been of incalculable service to literature.

GENERAL VIEW OF THE HISTORY OF ANCIENT LITERATURE.

A comprehensive glance over the entire field whose treasures we are about to examine in detail, will enable us the better to appreciate and remember their relative age and value. Beginning, then, with the most distant periods, we find a literature developed in Mesopota’mia, Egypt, Iran, and China, even before 2000 B.C. At that date, the valley of the Euphrates and Tigris was the seat of a civilized Turanian people, the inventors of the complex system of cuneiform[Pg 26] writing, thought by some to be the oldest in the world. These Turanian Chaldees, mingled with a Semitic race, were then beginning to enjoy their golden age of letters; at the same time, the ancient Persians and Hindoos were composing hymns; the sages of China were busy on their sacred books; and Egypt had made considerable advance in both poetry and prose.

To trace the progress of literature in these remote times from century to century is impossible. Five hundred years, however, bring us to the Augustan era of romance and satire, epic and devotional poetry, in Egypt: they introduce us to Zoroas’ter, the founder or reformer of the ancient Persian religion, whose teachings are set forth in the Aves’ta; to the Ve’da, or Brahman Bible; to Moses and the Pentateuch; and to Phœnician theology, science, and poetry. Meanwhile Chaldean literature declines, and Assyrian letters come into view. During the next five centuries, poetry and science continue to flourish in Egypt, though not perhaps with their pristine vigor; Phœnicia maintains her literary reputation; the Veda grows; and Persian priests are occupied in enlarging and modifying their sacred texts.

1000 B.C. was the era of great epics. The epic, or narrative poem, based on some important event (in Greek, επος) or chain of events, though first appearing in Egypt, was brought to perfection, about this time, by the Greeks, and some say by the Hindoos also, Aryan nations holding no intercourse with each other. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey were paralleled by two stupendous Indian poems, the Râmâyana (rah-mah’-yă-nă) and the Mahâbhârata (mă-hah’bah’ră-tă).[3] To these, all dazzling with Oriental splendor, the epics of the Greek bard may yield in luxuriance of fancy and gorgeous imagery; but in power of description, sublimity of thought,[Pg 27] and attractive simplicity of expression, Homer was without an equal.

While, then, the Semitic nations as a rule employed prose as the vehicle of their earliest records of events, Greece and India, types of the Aryan stock, transmitted their legends to posterity in epic verse. Later times have not failed to perpetuate the taste, and measurably the ability; epic poetry has been cultivated by all the Indo-European nations, and to them it has been confined.—Contemporaneously with Homer, native poets were inditing ballads and pastorals in China, and the Hebrews enjoyed their golden age of secular and religious poetry; Egypt had entered on her literary, as well as her political, decline.

Henceforth our interest centres principally in Greece. Until 800 B.C., the poems of Homer and of Hesiod, his contemporary or immediate successor, constituted the bulk of Hellenic literature. Then began a transition to a poetry more natural—a poetry of the emotions—on themes that kindled love, anger, hatred, grief, hope; and for three centuries lyrics in different forms echoed throughout the land. Archil’ochus poured forth his caustic satires; Tyrtæus, his inspiriting war-songs; Sappho, her passionate strains; Anacreon, the joys of the winecup; Simon’ides breathed his touching laments; and Pindar stirred the soul with his grand odes, as with the sound of the trumpet. Prose also received attention, and Ionian authors took the initiative in systematic historical composition. Rude religious festivals suggested dramatic representations; and the pioneers in tragedy and comedy rode about the country, exhibiting their novel art on carts which carried the performers and their machinery.—Meanwhile in the East, Assyrian literature reached its highest development at Nineveh, to be buried beneath the ruins of that city, 625 B.C. Letters then revived at Babylon, and for nearly a century flourished there; Jewish poetry declined; and Con[Pg 28]fucius, the philosopher of transcendent wisdom, appeared in China.

Early in the 5th century, Greece plunged into a struggle for life or death with the Persian Empire—a struggle from which she emerged covered with glory, united and free. Her triumph is straightway sung in immortal verse, and historians arise to record her exploits. Athens, who faced the enemy at Marathon, Salamis, and Platæa, and drove him back crippled and disgraced to Asia, now becomes the leader of grateful Hellas, and the centre of literature and refinement. Blossom after blossom unfolds in her genial clime. She makes ample amends for her barrenness in the past by unprecedented fruitfulness, and gives to the nations a drama, lustrous with the names of Æschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (es’ke-lus, sof’o-kleez, eu-rip’e-deez)—the great tragic trio of antiquity. Comedy also, as represented by Aristophanes, is perfected in her theatre.

Then come the Peloponnesian War and the consequent humiliation of Athens; the overthrow of her democratic government, and the partial decline of literature, particularly poetry, with the fall of free institutions. Still, writers of genius are not wanting. The graphic pens of Thucydides and Xenophon lend additional graces to the history of Greece; Plato and Aristotle make her name immortal in philosophy; and the world’s greatest orators electrify her assemblies with their eloquence. Demosthenes, prince of them all, stands forth as the champion of Grecian liberty, and thunders his Philippics at the wily Macedonian who would enthrall his country. But the star of Macedon was in the ascendant. Chærone’a decided the fate of Greece; and she who had withstood the legions of Xerxes, gave way before the invincible phalanx of Philip and Alexander.

A sad period of decadence followed. Alexandria, in Egypt, founded by the conqueror whose name it bore (332 B.C.), became the centre of learning as well as commerce; and Athens[Pg 29] yielded to her fate, wasting her time in empty philosophical discussions and the pursuit of pleasure. Poetry languished, yet flashed out occasionally in epic or didactic form, bringing to mind the glories of the past. It is true that in the idyls of Theocritus (little pictures of domestic life) pastoral verse now bloomed for the first time on European soil, and with fine effect; but it was in far-off Syracuse, not in classic Greece. Here the deepening twilight was fatal to literary growth; and when Egypt fell beneath the power of Rome in the first century B.C., Greek letters sought a new asylum in the city of Romulus.

Turning to Rome, we find that she had long displayed an appreciation of Grecian genius as well as a striking talent for imitation. About the middle of the third century B.C., with little or no literature of her own, she gladly appropriated the foreign treasures held up before her admiring eyes by Liv’ius Androni’cus, a Tarentine Greek, whom the fortunes of war had made the slave of a Roman master. This most ancient of Latin poets put upon the stage versions of the Greek dramas, and with his translation of the Odyssey took his captors captive. Nævius and Ennius, following in the path thus opened, gave Italy its first epics; Ter’ence and Plautus made the people familiar with the humors of comedy; and Cato imparted dignity to Latin prose.

Oratory, for which the Romans had a natural aptitude, culminated in the speeches of Cicero, who ushered in the golden age. In his writings, as well as in the histories of Cæsar, Sallust, and Livy, prose now attracted with its finished periods. Nor was poetry less notably represented. Catullus, vehement and pathetic by turns, transplanted the ode and epigram to Italy; Lucre’tius threw into verse his ideal of philosophy; Tibullus excelled in simplicity and tenderness; while Virgil and Horace rivalled, as they doubtless imitated, the first poets of Greece.

[Pg 30]

Virgil’s epic, the Æne’id, as remarkable for beauty as Homer’s is for grandeur, secured to its author the first place among Latin poets; and next to him stands Horace, with his faultless mastery of metre and keen observation of men and manners. Their genius shed on the court of the first emperor, Augustus, a peculiar lustre, still recognized in our application of the epithet Augustan to the most brilliant period of a nation’s literature.

It is not strange that under the tyranny of the Cæsars literary decay set in; yet Rome’s silver age was kept bright by the labors of Persius and Juvenal, the unsparing satirists; Lucan, author of the epic Pharsalia; the grave and accurate historian Tacitus; the two Plinies; and Quintilian, the rhetorician. Taste, however, had sadly deteriorated; genius died with patriotism; and despots sought in vain to restore for their own corrupt purposes the ancient spirit which they had crushed out. At length the degenerate Latin writers laid aside their own manly tongue for Greek; and the list of the monuments of Roman genius was complete.

Such has been, in general, the course of every literature. We trace successively the birth of poetry; the gradual perfecting of prose; the ripening of simplicity into elegance; the perversion of elegance into affectation; the language and literature, losing the vigor of manhood, affected with the feebleness of age, and either succumbing at once to some great civil convulsion or perishing by a slow but no less certain living death. As with political, so with literary history:—

THE SANSCRIT LANGUAGE.

Characteristics.—Oldest of all the Indo-European tongues, and most closely resembling the common parent that is lost, is Sanscrit—the language spoken by those fair-skinned Aryans who more than thirty centuries ago, swarming through the Hindoo Koosh passes, made the sunny plains of Hindostan their own (page 16). Sanscrit spread over most of the peninsula; and the meaning of the word, perfected, is significant of the flexibility, refinement, regularity, and philosophical system of grammar, by which the language was distinguished. In luxuriance of inflection it was unequalled. Its nouns were varied according to eight cases, and three numbers (singular, dual, and plural); and its verbs, which assumed causal, desiderative, and frequentative forms, were carried in conjugation through three voices, the active, middle, and passive. Its chief fault—a result of its very richness—lay in the frequent use of long compounds, particularly adjectives, presenting what seems to us a confused combination of ideas, sometimes ludicrously lengthened out; as in the expressions, “always-to-be-remembered-with-reverence patriot,” “water-play-delighted [Pg 32]maidenn-bathing-fragrant river-breezes” (that is, river-breezes made fragrant by the bathing of maidens delighted with sporting in the water). (Consult Dr. Perry’s “Sanscrit Primer.”)

Brahman Priest.

Neither the parallelism of Hebrew poetry (page 89) nor the rhyme of modern times finds a place in Sanscrit verse; it is distinguished from prose, like Greek poetry, simply by a metrical arrangement of long and short syllables. The measured cadence gave great delight to the cultivated ear of the Hindoos. “There are two excellent things in the world,” says one of their writers—“the friendship of the good, and the beauties of poetry.”

Sanscrit is now a dead language. About three hundred years before the Christian era, dialects similarly derived took its place among the people, and it has since been kept alive only in the conversation and writings of the learned, as the sacred language of the Brahmans, or priestly caste.[4] Yet so extensive is its literature that it costs a Brahman half his life to master a portion of its sacred books alone.

Sanscrit Alphabet.—As to the origin of the Sanscrit alphabet, consisting of fifty letters, history is silent. It is believed that the entire early literature was preserved for centuries by[Pg 33] oral repetition. When their polished tongue was first expressed in written characters—derived from the Phœnicians or independently invented—so perfectly did these answer the purpose that the Hindoos styled their alphabet “the writing of the gods.” The Sanscrit letters are still preserved in the written language of the pure Hindoos, but in that of the Mohammedan population have been replaced with the Arabic characters.

History of Sanscrit Researches.—Arabian translations of Sanscrit works were made as early as the reign of the Caliph Haroun’-al-Raschid, at Bagdad (800 A.D.), and appeared from time to time in the succeeding centuries. Europeans first knew of the existence of Sanscrit and its literature during the reign of Au’rungzebe (1658-1707), in whose time the French and English obtained a foothold in Hindostan. Before this, the Jesuit Nobili (no’be-le) had gone to India to study the sacred books with a view to the conversion of the Hindoos, and, having mastered them, boldly preached a new Veda; but he died on the scene of his labors, and Europe profited nothing by his researches. It was left for the Asiatic Society, organized at Calcutta in 1784 by Sir William Jones, to open the eyes of Europe to the importance and magnitude of Brahman literature, of which the translation of Sakoon’talâ (page 50) by this great orientalist gave a most favorable specimen.

Following in the footsteps of the English scholar just mentioned, the German critic Schlegel, in his “Language and Wisdom of the Indians” (1808) laid the permanent foundations of Comparative Philology, a science of recent birth but one that has been of incalculable service to history, establishing the kinship of the Hindoos and Persians with the old Greeks and Romans, as well as the modern nations of the west, by striking resemblances in their respective tongues. Eminent scholars have since prosecuted the work with enthusiasm—especially Bopp, Humboldt, Pott, and Grimm among the Ger[Pg 34]mans, the French savant Bournouf, Max Müller in England, and the American Whitney. Sanscrit is no longer a sealed volume. The leading European universities have their professors of that tongue, who lecture also on comparative grammar. (See Whitney’s article on Philology, Enc. Brit. V. xviii.)

SACRED LITERATURE OF THE HINDOOS.

The Veda.—The language of the ancient Indo-Aryans survives in the Ve’da, the oldest work of Indo-European literature, dating back to the prehistoric era of the Aryan race. The Veda, while rich in striking imagery, is marked by a beautiful simplicity of diction. In its language, we behold the most ancient form of our own tongue; in the hymns of its poets, those germs of Aryan intellectual development that no long time after bloomed in epic and idyl through the fertile valleys of India, bore immortal fruit on the soil of Greece and Rome, and have been brought to perfection in the grand productions of modern genius. (The student is referred to Max Müller’s “Rig-Veda-Sanhita,” and Dr. Arrowsmith’s Translation of Prof. Kaegi’s “Rig-Veda.”)

The word Veda means knowledge. The Mantra, or “song” portion of the Veda, is divided into four parts: the Rig-Veda (knowledge of the stanzas), or Veda of hymns; the Sâma-Veda, of tunes or chants, and the Yajur-Veda, of sacrificial rites (prayers)—both purely ritualistic; and the Artharva-Veda, in the main a collection of incantations and spells: Each of the last-named Vedas is a medley of extracts from the Rig-Veda, with additions from outside sources. Thus it will be seen that the Hindoos were believers in the efficacy of sacrifices, some of which were prolonged for months and even years, as well as of talismans, charms, and incantations to ward off disease, bring riches, and inspire love.

To the metrical parts of the Vedas are attached the Brâhmanas, which abound in tedious descriptions of rites, and[Pg 35] were written long after in prose to explain the hymns. There are also collections of rules for worship and sacrifice; and speculations on philosophy and religion, which display no little acuteness, for the Hindoo mind seems to have been prone to metaphysical investigation and ingenious in reasoning even to the verge of sophistry. Supplements to the Vedas contain abundant commentaries on their grammar and language, as well as astronomical facts—the latter mainly borrowed from other nations and not based on original researches or discoveries. Finally, the Upave’das (oo-pă-vā’dăz—appended) treat of diseases and their cure, devotional music, the use of weapons, and the arts; while the Purânas (poo-rah’năz), of more recent birth, believed to have been revealed from heaven like the Vedas, present in verse the mythology of India and the history of its legendary age.

Religion of the Veda.—The Supreme Being first acknowledged by the Aryans was gradually lost sight of, and a worship of Nature arose. In the 1,028 hymns of the Rig-Veda (by several hundred authors, and comprising 10,580 verses), “thrice eleven” gods are invoked as intelligent beings, the principal of whom are Varuna (vur’oo-nah)—god of waters, the sun, the moon, the day, fire, the storm (Indra), the dawn, and the earth; and to “the three and thirty,” offerings were made of cakes, wine, and grain. They were immortal; clothed with power to answer prayer, and punish those who offended them. But as each great god is recognized as supreme in different hymns, it is with good reason thought that, under various names, one omnipotent Being is worshipped, called in the Veda “God above all gods,” “that One alone who has upheld the spheres.” “Wise poets,” says the Rig-Veda, “make the Beautiful-winged, though he is one, manifold by words.”[5]

[Pg 36]

In the following hymn to Varuna is apparent the belief that evil-doing is hateful to the Almighty, that man is by nature prone to sin, and that God stands ready to exercise forgiveness.

HYMN TO VARUNA.

(We have given Max Müller’s literal translation a dress of verse, the better to bring out the effect of the refrain.)

But of all the conceptions of the Vedic writers, that of the Dawn Goddess was the most poetical. Watching for the first flush in the eastern sky, her ancient worshippers, with their hands devoutly placed upon their foreheads, opened their hearts in strains of praise to the gloom-dispelling Dawn, the golden-hued Daughter of Heaven, leading on the sun with her modest smile, “like a radiant bride adorned by her mother for the bridegroom.”

The sun is represented as a glorious prince, hastening after the Dawn-maiden and trying to discover her by a tiny slipper which she has dropped, and which is too small for another to wear; but the prince never overtakes the flying maid. This beautiful myth is the origin of the tale of Cinderella.

[Pg 37]

The Veda contains no allusions to those corrupt practices which afterward became the distinguishing marks of Brahmanism. At this early period there was no belief in the transmigration of the souls of men into inferior animals; on the contrary, the Vedic Aryans looked for “excellent treasures in the sky.” To caste, they were also strangers; idols were unknown; and suttee, the burning of the widow at her husband’s funeral, was an unheard-of barbarity.

Social Life of the Vedic People.—The hymns of the Rig-Veda picture the manners and customs of an intellectual people, far advanced in the arts. Princely palaces are described, fortified cities, monarchs possessed of fabulous riches, ladies elegantly attired. There were poor as well as rich, workers in the various handicrafts; shipbuilding was practised, and naval expeditions were undertaken. Even at this remote day literary meetings were held.

Nor were the crimes and vices of later times unknown. Liars are denounced; thieves, robbers, and intoxicating drinks, are mentioned; while in one hymn, a gambler laments his ruin by “the tumbling dice,” and warns others not to play, but rather to practise husbandry. (On the lessons of the Veda, see Max Müller’s “India: What can It Teach Us?” p. 141.)

The following extract from one of the secular hymns which are interspersed with those of a religious character, shows some knowledge of human nature:—

EVERY ONE TO HIS TASTE.

LAW-BOOKS OF THE HINDOOS.

Laws of Manu.—Of the many Indian treatises on the moral law still extant, the most important is the Institutes of Manu (mun’oo). Early texts transmit the idea of this venerable lawgiver, sprung from Brahma in the Vedic period. That the code now bearing his name embodies the precepts of so ancient a sage, is doubtful. The laws are written in verse. Four distinct castes are recognized, ascending through the successive grades of laborers, farmers, warriors, and princes, to the highest, which consisted of the priests of Brahma, “the soul of the universe, whom eye, tongue, mind, cannot reach,” from whose substance all men proceed and to whom all must return through various states of existence. The childlike religion of the Veda has disappeared.

The word brahma often occurs in the Vedas with the signification of worship, or hymn, the vehicle of worship. In the later Vedic poems it came to mean the universal but impersonal spiritual principle, all-pervading and self-existent. In Manu’s Ordinances, Brahma is endowed with personality, and a definite place is assigned him in the national religious system, as the creative spirit who made the universe before undiscerned discernible in the beginning. He, as the Creator, is united with the three-eyed thousand-named Siva (se’vah) the Destroyer, and Vishnu the Preserver, in the Hindoo triad. Vishnu was the first-begotten of Brahma, a benevolent being who, to overcome the malignant agents of evil, submitted to various embodiments in human or animal form, known as[Pg 39] Av’atars. Nine avatars, which the Hindoos believed to have taken place, were favorite themes of Sanscrit poetry; the tenth, still future, would result in the overthrow of the present state of things and the ushering in of a new and better era. (Read Hopkins’s “The Ordinances of Manu.”)

Moral Precepts.—The Institutes of Manu regulated the moral and social life of the people, prescribing certain rules for the government of society and the punishment of crimes. Purity of life was enjoined on all. One of the chief duties was to honor father and mother—the mother a thousand times the most—and the Brahman more than either. Widows are forbidden to remarry, and the duties of a wife are thus described:—

The following was the punishment for killing a cow, an animal treated with the honors due to a deity:—

OTHER EXTRACTS FROM MANU.

EPIC POETRY.

Indian literature boasts of two grand epic poems—gems that would shine in the crown of a Homer or a Milton—the Râmâyana (rah-mah’yă-nă—Adventures of Râma) and the Mahâbhârata (mă-hah’bah’ră-tă—Great War of Bhârata), “the Iliad and Odyssey of Sanscrit poetry.” The date of these epics is uncertain. Both contain ancient Vedic traditions, but mingled with these is much that is more recent. It is probable that the old songs and stories were current among the people ages before they were arrayed in their present dress by later poets, who gave them a different religious coloring to suit the Brahmanical doctrines. Their language is an improvement on that of the Veda in polish and softness; improvement would naturally result from oral repetition. (See Monier Williams’s “Indian Wisdom.”)

The Râmâyana, by the poet Vâlmiki (vahl’me-ke), relates the achievements of Râma (the name assumed by Vishnu in his seventh avatar, or incarnation), who descended to earth that he might destroy a demon-prince in Ceylon. Râma becomes the first-born of the monarch of Oude and heir-apparent to the throne, marries a lovely princess, Sîtâ (se’tah), whose hand others had vainly sought, and daily increases in popularity. But Râma’s mother was not the only queen; a younger and more beautiful rival prevails on the old king to appoint her son his successor instead of Râma, and to banish the latter for fourteen years.

Loyal to his father, though he might have seized the crown by force, as his mother in her first disappointment bade him[Pg 41] do, Râma set out for the wilderness, accompanied by his bride, who refused to remain behind in the luxurious capital. Soon after his father died of grief; whereupon the younger brother rejected the crown, and, seeking the exile in the jungle, saluted him as king. Râma, however, declined the honor, and, proceeding to fulfil his mission, slew the demon and conquered Ceylon. Then with his faithful wife he returned to Oude, to reign jointly with his brother and usher in a golden age.

The Râmâyana, in this fiction, is supposed to refer to the conquest of southern India and Ceylon by the Aryans. It so delighted the Hindoos that it was said, “He who sings and hears this epic continually has attained to the highest enjoyment, and will finally be equal to the gods.”

FROM THE RÂMÂYANA.

Sîtâ, informed by her husband of his banishment, thus tenderly pleads to be the companion of his exile:—

But Râma seeks to dissuade her:—

Yet Sîtâ still refuses to be parted from her husband, and with tearful eyes exclaims:—

But, Râma being still inexorable, Sîtâ bursts forth in anger, upbraids him for his cruelty in deserting her, and finally, overcome by emotion, falls weeping at his feet. Then Râma raises her in his arms, and pours these soothing accents in her ear:—

As a favorable specimen of the florid description in which Hindoo imagination excels, we quote from the same epic,

[Pg 43]

THE DESCENT OF THE GANGES.

The Mahâbhârata is a vast collection of miscellaneous poetry, attributed to Vyâsa (ve-ah’să), “the arranger,” containing over 200,000 lines, and relating the history of a struggle between two branches of an ancient royal family. Jealousy led to the separation of the rival parties, one of which, the Pândavas (pahn’dă-văz), cleared the jungle and founded the city of Delhi (del’le). But their enemies, the Kurus (Koo’rooz), resolving to dispossess them, challenged the Pândavas to a gambling match; the latter accepted, but were cheated out[Pg 44] of all their possessions by the use of loaded dice, and driven into the wilderness. A savage war ensued, resulting in the triumph of the Pândavas, and their elevation over the neighboring rajahs. (See Arnold’s “Indian Idylls.”)

The great Hindoo epics are both enlivened by charming episodes. The most beautiful of those interwoven in the Mahâbhârata are called “the Five Precious Gems.” Of these, the magnificent philosophical poem entitled The Divine Song withdraws the reader for a while from the tumult of war, and introduces him to a profound theological dialogue between a disguised god and one of the principal combatants. It inculcates the existence of one Immutable, Eternal Being, and teems with grand thoughts not unlike those we should expect from a Christian teacher. The immortality of the soul is thus sublimely set forth by the deity, on the eve of a decisive battle, for the purpose of removing the scruples of the chief, while the latter humanely hesitates to precipitate the conflict in view of the slaughter that would ensue:—

But of all the episodes, that of Nala (nul’ă) and Damayanti is unsurpassed for pathos and tenderness of sentiment. King Nala, enamored of the “softly-smiling” Damayanti, “pearl among women,” finds his love returned, and is accepted by her in preference to many other princes and even four of the gods. A jealous demon, however, possesses him, and causes him to lose at play everything except his bride, whom he cannot be prevailed upon to stake. Yet at last, in his madness, he deserts her in the forest, and Damayanti, after many strange adventures, reaches her father’s court in safety. There she adopts the device of inviting suitors a second time to propose for her hand, in the hope of bringing her lost husband to her side if he should hear that there was danger of his losing her forever.

Nala, meanwhile, disguised as a charioteer, had entered the service of another king, who now sets forth to offer himself to the beauteous princess, driven by her husband. When they arrive Damayanti penetrates the disguise of the charioteer, and to prove the correctness of her suspicions, puts him to the severest test. She contrives to have his children brought before him. The father’s heart is touched at once; he clasps them in his arms, and bursts into tears.

Not wishing, however, to reveal himself to a wife whom he thought false, he added by way of apology for his conduct,

[Pg 46]

Finally Nala makes himself known to Damayanti, and, convinced of her faithfulness, is reunited to her and regains his crown.

Such are the Sanscrit epics and their episodes. They are still recited in the temples of India to vast throngs of appreciative listeners; the reading of the Mahâbhârata is said to occupy from three to six months. (On the epics, consult Muir’s “Metrical Translations from Sanscrit Writers.”)

LYRIC AND DIDACTIC POETRY.

Kâlidâsa.—In lyric poetry, embracing idyls and amatory pieces, Sanscrit is no less rich than in epic, whether quantity or quality be considered. Foremost in this department is Kâlidâsa (kah’le-dah’să), about whose life, and even his exact period, nothing is certainly known, but whose works have crowned him with immortality. He is the author of many charming verses; and his poem, “the Seasons,” which draws fascinating pictures of the luxuriant landscapes of India, displaying on every page the poet’s ardent love for the beauties of nature, has the honor of being the first book ever printed in Sanscrit.

AUTUMN.

FROM KÂLIDÂSA’S SEASONS.

[Pg 48]

Surpassing “the Seasons” in dignity and elegance, “the Cloud Messenger,” by the same author, contains some fine flights of fancy. It tells how an inferior god, banished for twelve months to a sacred forest and thus separated from a wife whom he fondly loves, commits to a passing cloud a message for his goddess. He directs its imaginary journey through the sky, over forests and hills, to the city of the gods. There it will easily distinguish his wife, whom he paints to the cloud in glowing colors as the “first, best work of the Creator’s hand,” mourning over their separation.

He then intrusts the cloud with the tender words that he would breathe; bids it tell his beloved how he sees her in the rippling brooks, how

and finally he charges his messenger to console her afflicted heart with assurances of his unabated love, and to hasten back with tidings that may relieve his soul of its anxiety. The cloud obeys; but meanwhile the supreme deity learns of the message, repents of his severity, restores the exile to his wife, and blesses the pair with ceaseless joy.

Kâlidâsa also wrote three epics of a romantic character, one of them on the adventures of Nala and his devoted Damayanti. Well does he merit the title conferred on him by his admiring countrymen,—“the Bridegroom of Poesy.” [Pg 49]

Jayadeva (jī-ă-dā’vă), a poet probably of more recent times, if not equal to Kâlidâsa, yet has given us in Gîtagovinda one of the most enchanting idyls ever written. In this Song of the Shepherd Govinda, the form assumed by the god Krishna, are set forth in voluptuous colors the adventures of the deity and nine shepherdesses, his beautiful attendants. The whole is supposed to be a mystical allegory.

The high estimation in which Jayadeva is held, may be inferred from the following eulogy by an Oriental critic: “Whatever is delightful in the modes of music, whatever is exquisite in the sweet art of love, whatever is graceful in the strains of poetry—all that let the happy and wise learn from the songs of Jayadeva.” (See Arnold’s “Indian Poetry,” p. 86.)

Whittier has furnished us the following spirited version of a Hindoo lyric by a poet who flourished in the third century of our era, and who, if we may judge by his writings, had conceptions of God and duty not unworthy of a Christian bard.

GIVING AND TAKING.

[Pg 50]

THE DRAMA.

The Sanscrit Shakespeare.—Not the least valuable of Sanscrit treasures is its dramatic poetry. Here, as in lyric verse, Kâlidâsa stands prëeminent, the Shakespeare of India. His title to this distinction rests mainly on his drama of Sakoon’talâ, or the Lost Ring, which portrays the simple life and unsophisticated manners of his countrymen with all his characteristic tenderness of expression and rich imagination.

Plot of Sakoontalâ.—In early summer—the fitting season, sacred as it was to the god of love—the play of Sakoontalâ was wont to be acted in ancient India. The heroine, whose name the drama bears, was the daughter of a nymph, and dwelt at a hermitage in the jungle. Led to her retreat by chance in his pursuit of a deer, a neighboring rajah espies the “slender-waisted” forest maid, with two lovely companions, watering the shrubbery. Concealing himself among the trees, he plays eaves-dropper, and as he watches the trio he cannot restrain his admiration; “the woodland plants,” he cries, “outshine the garden flowers.” His heart is lost forthwith. Ordering his camp to be pitched near by, he wooes and finally weds Sakoontalâ, with the assurance that she shall “reign without a rival in his heart.” Then leaving his bride a marriage-ring, engraved with his name, as a token of their union, the rajah goes back to his palace, promising that Sakoontalâ shall soon share his throne.

Not long after his departure, a sage whose anger she has incurred pronounces a curse upon the pair,—“that he of whom she thought should think of her no more,” should even forget her image, and that the spell should cease only at sight of the[Pg 51] marriage-ring. This token of remembrance, however, was secured on her finger; and at length Sakoontalâ, re-assured by a favorable omen, leaves the sorrowing companions of her girlhood, and the venerable hermit, her reputed father, to seek her husband in his capital.

Arrived in safety, she gains access to the royal presence; but the king, laboring under the curse, fails to recognize her. Sakoontalâ is unveiled, and stands before him in all her beauty—a beauty that stirs him to exclaim:—

Then Sakoontalâ seeks her ring, but alas! it is not on her finger; she must have dropped it in the Ganges. In the midst of her confusion a nymph appears, and carries her off to a sacred retreat, where she gives birth to a son.

Meanwhile a fish is caught, in which is found the fatal ring, stamped with the rajah’s name. It is restored to its owner, and at once the recollection of his long-forgotten Sakoontalâ flashes upon his mind. Overwhelmed with poignant regret for her loss, he abandons himself to melancholy for a time, calling on her beloved name, or trying to beguile his grief by tracing with his pencil her features now but too well remembered. At length ambition and piety unite to wake him from his lethargy. He embarks in a campaign against the giants, enemies of the gods; is victorious; and finds the consummation of happiness at last in a union with his long-lost wife, and with his son, whose name, Bhârata, becomes the most distinguished in the mythology of India.

English readers are enabled to enjoy the beauties of Sakoontalâ through the metrical version of Prof. Williams.

[Pg 52]

EXTRACTS FROM SAKOONTALÂ.

PARTING WORDS OF THE SAGE TO HIS ADOPTED DAUGHTER.

THE KING AND SAKOONTALÂ’S PORTRAIT.

While gazing on the picture, the king in his infatuation mistakes for reality a bee which he has himself painted in the act of settling on the rosy lips of his love, and after attempting to drive it off is apprised of his error by an attendant, whom he thus addresses:—

Sakoontalâ may justly be called the pearl of Eastern dramatic poetry. It has been translated into every European tongue, and has elicited the admiration of all civilized nations. In the language of Goethe:—

From the author of this drama we have two other pieces worthy of his fame, “the Hero and the Nymph” and a popular comedy. His era was the golden age of the Hindoo theatre.

Other noted plays, a few out of many, are “the Toy Cart,” a domestic drama with a public underplot; “the Signet of[Pg 54] the Minister,” which had a political bearing; “the Stolen Marriage;” and an allegorical play, “the Moonrise of Science.”

The Hindoo Drama, the invention of which was ascribed to an ancient sage inspired by Brahma himself, consisted at first of music, dancing, and pantomime. An outcome of the prevailing mythology, it was made a feature of the Indian festivals, and from very early rude beginnings of which we have no remains gradually progressed to the perfection with which Kâlidâsa invested it. Unfolding the inner life of the people and illustrating their peculiar institutions, it is at once interesting and valuable, original, and in its delineations of character strikingly true to nature. Love is its principal subject; and, what is markedly characteristic, its denouements are always happy. Tragedy is foreign to the Hindoo stage.

The Indian plays began and closed with a benediction or prayer; in many cases there was a preliminary account of the author, or a colloquy between the manager and one of the actors, leading the way to the play itself. The heroes were generally kings or deities. As foils to these, it was usual to introduce mountebanks or buffoons, and as such Brahmans were made to figure. The Hindoo dramatists did not hesitate to set forth their priests in a ridiculous light; a remarkable fact, when we remember that the drama in India was a semi-religious institution, and that the managers of companies were usually themselves Brahmans. The playwright who in Greece should have taken such liberties with his religious superiors would have run the risk of being driven from the stage, if indeed he were not more seriously handled by an indignant audience.

The consistency observed in managing the dialogue is noteworthy. The parts spoken by divinities and heroes, rulers and priests, are always in ancient Sanscrit; while the[Pg 55] inferior personages and the female characters use the later and more familiar dialect. Want of acquaintance with the sacred language, which thus formed the staple of the classical plays, no doubt prevented the common people from fully understanding and enjoying dramatic representations; and hence the latter never attained that popularity which they had in other countries. They were the entertainment of the cultured class rather than the masses.

Another curious feature of the Hindoo drama was the absence of scenery, the plays being mostly represented in the open air, the courts of palaces, etc. The great advantage which the modern performer derives from fine scenic effects was entirely wanting. Changes of scene could be indicated only in the text, by minute descriptions of the new locality, thrown into the mouths of the speakers and left for the audience to fill out and remember. No shifting of scenes, for instance, as with us, would denote the entrance of one of the characters from out-doors into a drawing-room; but the personage entering, either in a soliloquy or in colloquy with some other, would immediately call attention to every little point—the threshold, the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the doors, the windows, the furniture—and the glowing fancy of his hearers would at once picture the scene as vividly as if it stood before them in reality.

The proprieties were strictly observed. To represent a death scene would have been intolerable; nor only so, but in the earlier and purer days no dramatist would introduce before his audience a scene of violence, eating, sleeping, or the performance of the marriage ceremony. A charming love-scene in the Sakoontalâ breaks off just at the critical moment when the hero and heroine are about to interchange a token of affection; yet the embrace does not appear always to have been repugnant to the Hindoo ideas of delicacy.

As to the date of the dramas that have been mentioned,[Pg 56] they are supposed to have been written during the first ten centuries of the Christian Era; but here, as in the case of the epics and lyrics, we are left to conjecture. Could we know more certainly what times they reflect, our pleasure in perusing them would be complete.

TALES AND FABLES.

India has long enjoyed the reputation, and not without reason, of having been the favorite home of fairy-tale and fable. From her storehouse of fictions, many waifs have crept into the literatures of both Europe and Asia, and striking the popular taste have attained wide currency. Tongues have changed, dynasties have fallen; but these stories by unknown hands still live in the nursery, influencing the pliant minds of the children of to-day as they have done those of the last twenty centuries.

The Sanscrit has two great collections of fables,—the Pankatantra, Five Stories (more properly Five Sections); and the Hitopadesa, Friendly Advice, a charming compilation from the former. The Hitopadesa, translated into many languages, has almost rivalled in circulation the Bible itself. In the following fable, selected from “the Friendly Advice,” will be seen the germ of La Fontaine’s charming imitation, “the Milkmaid and the Pitcher of Milk;” both point the same moral as our own cautionary proverb, “Don’t count your chickens before they are hatched.”

THE STUPID BRAHMAN.

Of the numerous collections of tales and romances, the best known is “the Ocean of the Rivers of Narratives,” the original of that more familiar compilation, the Arabian Nights.

HISTORY, GRAMMAR, ETC.

Sanscrit is also worthily represented in other departments of literature; on the fine arts we have nothing worthy of notice, but science has not been neglected, while historical, grammatical, and philosophical works, complete the category of its productions. Its chronicles, however, obscured as they are by myths without number, are comparatively valueless; but one deserves the name of history, the Chronicle of Cashmere, or the Stream of the Kings, extending from the fabulous ages to the reign of Akbar, who reduced that province in the 16th century.

But in grammar we must certainly award to Sanscrit the very first place. Commentaries on the constructions of the Veda, dating perhaps from 750 B.C., embody the earliest attempts at grammatical and critical investigation with which we are acquainted; and in the digest of Pânini (pah’ne-ne) (500 B.C.?) we have the first systematic grammar that the world ever produced—a book remarkable for its completeness, declared by Max Müller to be “the perfection of an empirical analysis of language, unsurpassed—nay, even unapproached, by anything in the grammatical literature of other nations.”

[Pg 58]

In connection with the literature of India, we may also mention inscriptions on monuments, in temples and grottoes, and on plates of marble and copper. These are worthy of study mainly in view of the historical information they may afford.

Such is a history, in outline, of the ancient Sanscrit, of which Prof. Müller has written: “The study of it will open before you large layers of literature as yet almost unknown and unexplored, and allow you an insight into strata of thought rich in lessons that appeal to the deepest sympathies of the human heart.”

BUDDHIST LITERATURE.

About 500 B.C., a new and purer religion was preached in India by a monk of royal birth, afterward called Buddha (the Enlightened). It met with a hearty reception from the people, for it taught men to live in charity with their neighbors, to reverence their parents, to practise truth and morality; above all, it overthrew the institution of caste, and abolished the foolish system of Brahman sacrifices. The riches and fleeting pleasures of this world, Buddha proclaimed unworthy of pursuit, representing life itself as a burden, and promising his followers a paradise of eternal rest[7] beyond the grave. No wonder that thousands declared in favor of the new faith, which during a struggle of many centuries disputed with[Pg 59] Brahmanism for the supremacy of India. Pushing out to the northeast, it made its way into Thibet, China, and Japan; and at the present day has more followers than any other religious system, their number being estimated at 450,000,000. (Consult Hardy’s “Manual of Buddhism.”)

The sacred books of the Buddhists are called the Tripitaka (three baskets); one is metaphysical, another disciplinary, and the third contains the discourses of Buddha. They are written in a dialect of Sanscrit, and are made up of 600,000 stanzas, containing five times as much matter as our Bible. (See Monier Williams’s “Buddhism in its Contrast with Christianity.”)

EXTRACTS FROM THE BUDDHIST SCRIPTURES.

NOTES ON HINDOO LITERATURE, ETC.

Avesta.—Sprung from the same ancient Aryan tongue as the Sanscrit of India, and distinguished by the same richness of inflection, is Avesta, the earliest language of Persia, still preserved to us in the Persian Scriptures known as the Avesta. The Veda and the Avesta have been described as “two rivers flowing from one fountain-head;” and beyond a doubt the Vedic Aryans and the Avesta-speaking Persians were originally one community, conversing in a common tongue.

The Avesta was first made known to Europeans by a French[Pg 61] orientalist; Anquetil Duperron (on^gk-teel’ deu-pa-ron^g’), who went to India for the express purpose of discovering the sacred books of the Parsees. With great difficulty he at length possessed himself of the much-desired Avesta manuscripts, and in 1771, after long and patient effort, he gave his countrymen men the first translation of the Avesta into a European tongue. The language has since been carefully studied, and in our own day has at last been mastered. Time wrought many changes in it; the Persian of Xerxes’ reign differed much more from the Avesta of antiquity than our present language does from the English of Chaucer. Further modifications and the introduction of Arabic elements have made modern Persian still more unlike the ancient vernacular.

The sacred writings of Persia just referred to are among the oldest and most important in the whole range of Indo-European literature. They contain the doctrines of Zoroaster, or Zarathushtra, the Bactrian sage who reformed the religious system of his country. (See Jackson’s Avesta Series, Part I.)

Zoroaster is believed to have flourished about 1400 B.C. Nothing is known of his life or history. Yet, through more than thirty centuries his influence has been felt; and to-day, though they have dwindled to perhaps 150,000 souls, his followers constitute a thrifty and intelligent population in India and Persia. These Parsees, or Fire-worshippers (called by the Mohammedans Guebres, or infidels), still burn the eternal fire, kindled as they believe from heaven, not for idolatrous worship, but as an emblem of Ormazd, the Almighty source of light. They are descendants of those Zoroastrians whom Darius and Xerxes launched against Europe in the mightiest armies ever raised by man, threatening to plant their purer faith amid the ruined shrines of Greece. (Read Haug’s “Essays on the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Parsis.”)

At a later date, when the Caliph Omar converted Persia to Mohammedanism with the sword (641 A.D.), their forefathers[Pg 62] clung to the ancient faith, and found an asylum across the Indus or in the deserts of their native land.

The Avesta (sacred text) contains the only existing monuments of a once extensive literature. It is divided into distinct parts, made up of separate pieces and fragments, which, repeated orally from generation to generation, were probably collected and reduced to writing in their present form many centuries after the period of Zoroaster. The compositions in question are chiefly professed revelations and instructions to mankind, confessions, prayers to the Supreme Being and various inferior deities, and metrical hymns (Gâthâs), simple and some of them so grand as to be deemed the productions of Zoroaster himself.

Zoroaster is represented in the Avesta as conversing with Ormazd, who, in answer to the inquiries of the sage, reveals his will, and prescribes the moral and ceremonial law. Thus, in the following passage, Zoroaster questions Ormazd:—

Avesta Philosophy.—The Avesta seems to recognize one eternal Supreme Being, infinite and omnipotent. This was Ormazd (Spiritual Wise One), whom Zoroaster invokes as the source of light and purity, “true, lucid, shining,” all-perfect, all-powerful, all-beautiful, all-wise.” Opposed to Ormazd was a principle of darkness and evil, called Ah’riman (Angra Mainyu, Sinful-minded). The theory of evolution finds no support in the Avesta, which contains an account of the creation of the universe strikingly like that of Moses. Traditions of the fall of man through the falsehood of Ahriman, and of a universal deluge, are also handed down. (On the Avesta, see Müller’s “Sacred Books of the East,” vols. iv., xxiii., xxxi.)

Zoroaster’s mission was to exhort men to follow the right and forsake the wrong. “Choose one of these two spirits, the Good or the Evil,” he said; “you cannot serve both.”

Like Buddha, the Persian reformer raised his voice against the priesthood, and the corruptions which had crept into the national religion. Devil-worship, which had come into vogue as a means of averting the evil supposed to be wrought by wicked spirits, he specially denounced, recognizing in sin the[Pg 64] cause of all human sorrow, and urging men to wage uncompromising warfare with the powers of darkness, relying for aid on the Good Spirit. “Give offering and praise,” says the Avesta, “to that Lord who made men greater than all earthly beings, and through the gift of speech created them to rule the creatures, as warriors against the evil spirits.” Fire was invoked as the symbol of Divinity, and the sun as “the eye of Ormazd;” but idolatry Zoroaster and his disciples abhorred.

Ormazd was the rewarder of the good, the punisher of the bad. Those who obeyed him, and were “pure in thoughts, pure in words, pure in actions,” were admitted at death into Paradise, “the House of the Angels’ Hymns,” where all was brightness: the wicked were consigned to a region of everlasting darkness, “the House of the Fiend Deceit.” Of all the religions of human origin, Zoroaster’s, though not free from superstition and cumbrous rites, approaches nearest to the truth. It was gladly accepted by the people, and did much to elevate them and improve their condition. We have thrown into verse the following

HYMN TO ORMAZD.

Persian Inscriptions.—In a flower-clad plain of southwest[Pg 65]ern Persia, shut in from the outer world by lofty hills, and now dotted with pleasant villages, once stood the great palace of Persep’olis, the wonder of the world for its magnificence—which Alexander, in a fit of drunken fury, reduced to a heap of ruins with his wanton torch (331 B.C.). Yet, though silent and deserted, “the piles of fallen Persepolis" speak to us, not only with their strange sculptures, but also through the inscriptions carved upon them in cuneiform letters, originally adorned with gold.

THE ROCK OF BEHISTUN.
MOUNTAIN RECORD OF DARIUS.

Not far from these ruins is the famous rock of Behistun, 1,700 feet high, and inscribed with the same arrow-headed, wedge-shaped characters. Some of these, protected from the[Pg 66] weather by a varnish of flint, have been wonderfully preserved to the present time.

This mountain-record was set up by Darius I. (516-515 B.C.), who, in the shadow of the palace-walls of Persepolis, was wont to sit upon a throne of gold, canopied by a vine of the same precious metal bearing clusters of priceless gems. It is his triumphal tablet, graven with figures of himself and several conquered princes. It records his victories, asserts his hereditary right to the throne, and enumerates the provinces of his vast empire, in nearly a thousand lines of cuneiform characters—in three different languages, the Persian, Scythian, and Babylonian—that it might be understood by all his subjects.

Here the Persian monarch announces his dignity, while he attributes the glory of it all to the God Supreme:—

Other inscriptions were cut by order of Xerxes, whose royal name and title they formally declare; but there are none of any later date. Cuneiform letters were also employed by other nations, as will be hereafter seen (page 105). Most of the ancient Persian literature was lost during the struggle with Alexander the Great, and subsequent wars and convulsions. (On the cuneiform monuments, see Johnson’s “Oriental Religions: Persia.”)

NOTES ON PERSIAN LITERATURE, ETC.

Chinese Language.—From the Persian Gâthâs and Vedic hymns, let us now turn to the prose writings of the Chinese philosophers, plain, grave, and moral in their tone. The language in which their tenets have been preserved differs materially from the musical Sanscrit and its sister Avesta.

Modern Chinese, which has changed but little from the ancient tongue and is the least developed of all existing languages, is monosyllabic; i. e. each syllable conveys a complete idea, all its words are expressed by single separate sounds. Of these elements, or roots, it contains 450; changes of emphasis and intonation, accompanied with corresponding changes in meaning, increase this number to 1,263.

Chinese may be called a language without grammar, as it[Pg 68] dispenses with inflection and conjugation, and leaves the relations of words and their functions as different parts of speech to be determined by the arrangement. Thus sin means honor, honorable, honorably, or to be honorable, according to its position in the sentence. Plurality and gender are generally indicated by adding roots with a modifying signification. Son in Chinese is man-child; daughter, woman-child; a mare is called a mother-horse; people is the word surnames with a hundred prefixed. This grouping together of roots is carried to great lengths. Writing materials is expressed by two words denoting four precious objects (paper, brush, ink, and palette); a trader is a buying-selling-man; a knife is a sword’s-son; while difference of opinion is expressed by four words meaning I east, thou west.

Characters used in Writing.—The written characters of the Chinese were originally outline pictures of visible objects; specimens are presented below. A crescent (1) stood for the moon; three peaks (2), for a mountain; (3) is a tortoise, (4) a fish, (5) a field. Pictographs were frequently combined to represent a single idea. The notion of song, for instance, was conveyed by a mouth and a bird (6); that of tears, by the symbols for eye and water; beauty and goodness, by the representation of a virgin and an infant.

One or more of these hieroglyphic symbols (determinatives) enter into the composition of every modern Chinese character—which has also a phonetic element, like the characters of the Egyptian (p. 120) and Assyrian (p. 106) systems. The ideographic element is indispensable: the one sound tschoo, for example, means ape, whirlpool, island, silk, deep, a wine, a kind[Pg 69] of plant, to enclose, to help, to quarrel, to walk, to answer. It would be next to impossible to interpret the written symbol correctly, were not a separate ideogram adopted for each idea. This necessary device, however, involved the wholesale multiplication of characters. Over 40,000 are contained in the fullest dictionaries; but three-fourths of this number are almost wholly unknown, and only about 5,000 are in common use.

It is interesting to notice how, in the course of ages, the old hieroglyphics have been transformed into the present characters. The symbol representing the verb to listen, two folding-doors and an ear between them is now written . Two shells exactly alike originally stood for two friends ; this symbol has been changed to . A mountain is now ; a field . The most complicated modern character is made by fifty-two strokes of the pen.

Antiquity of Chinese Literature.—China prides herself on her antiquity, and her literature carries us back to the remotest past. From those early days to the present the chain is almost unbroken, notwithstanding the irreparable loss sustained when the ruthless Ching Wang destroyed the great bulk of Chinese literature (220-205 B.C.). This emperor is noted for his erection of the Great Wall, and notorious for his contempt of learning. Thinking to reconcile the masses to his despotism by keeping them in ignorance, and to deceive posterity with the belief that he had founded the empire, he ordered all books, except those on husbandry, divination, and medicine, to be burned. Any person found with a book in his possession was condemned to labor four years on the Great[Pg 70] Wall, and several hundred scholars who resisted the royal decree were buried alive.

The dynasty of “the book-burner,” however, was not long after overthrown; and among the succeeding princes was found a “restorer of literature,” who collected and preserved for future generations the writings which, concealed by the people in the walls of their houses or buried beneath the beds of streams, had escaped destruction. To his praiseworthy efforts we are indebted for all that remains of the ancient literature,—the Sacred Books of China, edited by Confu’cius her admirable philosopher, as well as for the works of Confucius himself and his disciples.

Confucius, to whom we are thus introduced, the reverend master, the beloved teacher of his countrymen, stands out in bold relief as the most distinguished personage in Chinese history. His birth, which took place 551 B.C., was mysteriously predicted, as legend tells us, on a precious stone found in his father’s garden: “A child is about to be born, pure as the crystal wave; he shall be a king, but without territorial dominion.” Wonderfully has this prophecy been fulfilled; the child, as we shall see, became a king whose subjects were numbered by hundreds of millions.

Born in an evil age, when corruption had undermined the government, and misrule and violence were everywhere rife, Confucius early dedicated himself to the cause of social and political reform. At twenty-two he entered upon his work as a teacher, thoroughly fitted for the high vocation, for he had been so eager after knowledge as to feel no toil in its pursuit, and sometimes even to forget his food. His merits were recognized; and when at last he was raised to the position of prime-minister, he labored in season and out of season for the welfare of his people—and with the best results. But then, as now, princes were ungrateful, and the neglect of his sovereign led to his resignation. Henceforth the mission of Con[Pg 71]fucius, no less useful if humbler than before, was simply to disseminate his precepts, wandering from state to state among the fifteen millions who constituted the population of what was then China. Occupied thus and with the study of the Sacred Books, he finally found rest in his native state, and there passed his declining years in the midst of loving disciples, “unconscious,” as he tells us, “that he had reached old age.” He died at seventy-three, lamenting that, despite his prolonged efforts, so little had been accomplished toward elevating the moral standard of the nation.

Confucian Priest.

Yet after his death, his influence was destined far to exceed his most sanguine longings; it has been greater than that of any other human teacher. No other has ever spoken to so many millions, or received such honors from posterity. For more than twenty centuries, his precepts have been taught in the schools of China (and each little village has its common school); at stated times, every scholar, on entering in the morning, still bows in adoration before a tablet sacred to Confucius. The learned can repeat page after page from his classical books; and scores of his maxims are familiar to the masses, who have positively no other moral law to guide them. His tomb, approached by an avenue of cypresses through a gate of exquisite workmanship, is inscribed with the words, “The most sagely ancient Teacher; the all-accomplished, all-informed King.” About the spot are imperial tablets “with glowing tributes to the one man whom China delights to honor;” and in the city near by live 50,000 of his descendants, constituting a distinct class—the head of the family holding large[Pg 72] estates as “Duke by imperial appointment and hereditary right, continuator of the sage.” There is a temple of Confucius in every city, and Confucian priests superintend various ceremonies for both mandarins and common people.

Tenets of Confucius.—Confucius claimed no divine inspiration; he founded no new religion. To him the Almighty was “the Unknown God,” and there was no Paul to declare him to the philosopher. He avoided referring to a personal Supreme Being, and thought that the study of themselves should suffice for men. As to death and a future state, he was equally reticent. “While you do not know life,” he said to an inquiring disciple, “what can you know about death?” With polygamy, then an institution of his country, he found no fault; and for women as such he appears to have had no kindly word, or very elevated regard.

The aim of Confucius was to inculcate certain lofty principles of conduct, to govern men in their relations to each other and to the ruling powers. Respect for learning, filial piety,[8] and veneration for the men and institutions of ancient days, were corner-stones of his system, and are still deeply impressed on the Chinese mind. His golden rule “What you do not like when done to yourself, do not to others”—expressed in written language by a single ideogram—was the one word he specially commended as embodying the sum and substance of duty.

[Pg 73]

The practical workings of this rule, as enforced by the authority of the great master, were recently exemplified in the case of an American traveller. As he and his companion were passing through a Chinese town, their strange faces and unusual costumes attracted a crowd, and hooting seemed likely to be followed by serious violence. With admirable presence of mind, one of the strangers faced the throng, and amid a shower of mud and stones exclaimed: “Is this the way, O people! that you obey the precepts of your philosophers, to treat strangers within your walls tenderly? Have you forgotten the saying of your great master Confucius,—“That which I wish another not to do to me, I must not do to him?” The effect was electric. In a moment every hand was lowered, and the recent assailants sought as best they could to make amends for their rudeness.

The Chinese Classics comprise the Sacred Books already alluded to, viz., the Five King; also the Four Shoo, or Books of the Philosophers (Confucius and the writers of his school). King is the equivalent of our word text, and the Five Sacred Texts are the Yih King, Book of Changes; the Shoo King, Book of History; the She King, Book of Poetry; the Le Ke King, Book of Rites; and the Spring and Autumn, an historical record of events in the native state of Confucius, from 721 to 480 B.C. It was written by that philosopher himself, who so entitled it because “its commendations were life-giving like spring, and its censures life-withering like autumn.” The first four King, which rank with the most ancient creations of the human mind, were compiled and published by Confucius; the Book of Rites, originally drawn up by the ruler of Chow in the twelfth century B.C., received additions from subsequent writers. (See Johnson’s “Oriental Religions: China.”)

Little is known of the true nature of the mysterious Book of Changes; it apparently relates to divination. The Shoo King gives us the history of China from the earliest periods to[Pg 74] about 720 B.C., and contains, besides, discourses on music, astronomy, and the principles of government. Part of it was dictated from memory by a blind man after the destruction of the original tablets.

In the She King, we have a collection of 305 odes and hymns. Many of them, more than three thousand years old, were written while the Chinese Empire was as yet a mere bundle of feudal states; here, as in all other lands, the first grand thoughts of the people were cast in the mould of poetry. The odes are in rhyme, and mirror the every-day life and simple manners of antiquity—often in a highly metaphorical style, but with a dignity and attractiveness which the later poetry fails to exhibit. They paint pleasing pictures of rural quiet, contain delicate touches of nature, and in some few cases display a high appreciation of woman’s worth; on the whole, however, the status assigned to the gentler sex is low. Extracts from the Book of Poetry follow.

FESTAL ODE.

(Celebrating a feast given by an ancient king.)

PASTORAL ODE.

ODE TO A BRIDE.

The Book of Rites prescribes rules of conduct for all occasions, from the most important down to a mere interchange of greetings. With Chinamen ceremonial is everything, and the influence which this book has exerted on manners and society for three thousand years cannot be estimated. It is still the standard of etiquette, a governing board at Pekin being charged with the duty of enforcing its rigid observance.

Spring and Autumn, professedly written in the interests of morality and good order, to inspire wicked officials and undutiful sons with wholesome terror, disappoints us in the reading. It is made up of short, unconnected sentences, stating isolated facts (some of them quite insignificant) in the baldest manner, without any attempt at rhetorical excellence or any expression of condemnation or praise. Whether a temple is struck by lightning, or a father is murdered by his son, or locusts appear, or some glorious exploit is performed, or the ruler goes on a journey, or the sun is eclipsed—it is just stated in so many words—nothing more. The historical style of Confucius is certainly not striking, and we fail to see why the[Pg 77] guilty should have “quaked with fear” when his annals appeared.

The Four Shoo are constituted as follows: 1. The Confucian Analects (literary fragments). 2. The Great Learning. 3. The Doctrine of the Mean (as opposed to extremes—the Moderate). 4. The works of Mencius, or the philosopher Meng, a disciple of Confucius, and second only to his master among the sages of China.

The Analects consist of the sayings of Confucius, as they occur in conversations with his followers. Sententious, simple, and sometimes signally beautiful, they contain the very marrow of wisdom based upon observation and experience. They shine among the laconics of the world. A few specimens are subjoined.

EXTRACTS FROM THE ANALECTS.

The Great Learning, based on the teachings of Confucius, and ascribed to one or more of his followers, evinces political sagacity in its suggestions for the perfecting of government, insisting that the welfare of the people should be the single aim, and scouting the idea of any divine right in kings to rule except in accordance with the principles of justice and virtue.

EXTRACTS FROM THE GREAT LEARNING.

The Doctrine of the Mean was written by the grandson of Confucius, who in his boyhood listened to the wise instructions of the sage, and professed himself ready to carry “the bundle of firewood his grandsire had gathered and prepared,” thus leading Confucius to exclaim with delight: “My undertakings will not come to naught; they will be carried on, and flourish.” The philosophy of this work is obscure; for while it presents examples of filial piety, and draws an ideal of the perfect man, “possessed of all sagely qualities,” who alone is able to “accord with the course of the Mean,” its language with reference to that Mean is decidedly mystical. Thus:—

Mencius, author of the fourth Shoo, lived in a degenerate age, but without fear or favor threw himself into the arena to wrestle with wickedness. In the society around him he found many fitting marks for his shafts of humor and satire. Purification of heart was his remedy for evil; the sinlessness of childhood, his standard of moral purity. “The great man,” said Mencius, “is he who does not lose his child’s heart.”[Pg 80] Virtue and benevolence are insisted on in the voluminous works of this philosopher—the Plato of Chinese literature as Confucius was its Socrates[9]—a benevolence that should not only provide for the physical wants of the people, but also secure their education and moral advancement. We glean the following pointed sentences from the

SAYINGS OF MENCIUS.

Spirit of the Chinese Classics.—One prevailing spirit breathes through the nine classical books of the Chinese—a spirit of conservatism. Confucius nowhere encourages men to take independent flights into the realms of original thought. He ignores the future, and exalts the past. His motto was not Go up higher, but Walk in the trodden paths.[Pg 81] He sought to reclaim from sin and folly, but only by winning to the purer practices of that venerable antiquity which he so blindly admired. Beyond the old landmarks, he cared not even to point the way. (See Gray’s “China,” p. 75.)

Worshipping the Ancestral Tablet (p.72).

It is hardly strange that under such leadership the nation became wedded to formalism, wrapped itself in a complacent aversion to novelty or progress, eschewed dealings with the outer world, and in a word came to an intellectual standstill for four and twenty centuries.

Other Works.—There are numerous commentaries on the old classics, some themselves quite ancient; but they are mere reproductions or servile imitations of the original texts.

[Pg 82]

Different, however, are the works of Lao-Tse, who was contemporary with Confucius, and whose writings are so mystical that the matter-of-fact Confucius declared himself unable to comprehend them. He made something which he calls Tao the mainspring of the universe, the source and ultimate destination of all things. Many of his followers, to whom he recommended self-denial and retirement, became recluses; their philosophy was perpetuated, and Taoism is still professed to some extent in China.

Having little imagination for works of fiction and no genius for the higher departments of poetry, the ancient Chinese produced nothing of special note—nothing, at least, that has come down to us—except what has been mentioned. We have indeed numerous chronicles of the various dynasties, industriously and no doubt accurately compiled; but they lack the graces of style, and possess little interest for the general European reader. The Bamboo Annals, found in a royal tomb 284 A.D., is the oldest of these chronicles that have thus far come to light.

We are also told that before the Christian Era numerous treatises were written on philosophy, mathematics, medicine, military affairs, husbandry, law, and geography; but many of these perished in the convulsions which afterward shook the empire. (On the religious books of China, consult Max Müller’s “Sacred Books of the East,” vols. xvi., xxvii.)

With the languages of Siam, Burmah, and Thibet—all monosyllabic like the Chinese—are also connected literatures of considerable antiquity. In both Burmah and Siam the drama, often licentious, has always been popular, its exhibitions being sometimes prolonged for days. Burmah has records that purport to carry back its history almost to the Christian Era. The best writings of the Siamese are imitations of Hindoo fictions, while the literature of Thibet is largely made up of commentaries on the Tripitaka.

[Pg 83]

NOTES ON CHINESE LITERATURE, ETC.

Specimen Cash.

Bamboo tablets and the stylus, the ancient writing implements; these in the reign of Ching Wang, the book-burner, superseded by the brush, and paper made of closely woven silk. Silk paper, found too expensive, replaced in turn by paper made of the inner bark of trees, old rags, and worn-out fishing-nets. Books multiply in consequence. At the Christian Era, the imperial library contained 11,332 sections filled with books on all subjects, but no great productions of genius. The old classics still in the front rank.

Printing practised in China 600 A.D., nearly 900 years before its invention in Europe. Movable types invented by a blacksmith between 1000 and 1100 A.D. The types, made of clay hardened in the fire, reduced to an exact level by a smooth board, and then cemented to an iron plate with a mixture of resin and wax. The production of books thus greatly facilitated. Chinese books at the present day not printed from movable types, but from wooden blocks of the size of the page, on which the characters are cut in relief.

Bronze pieces called cash, worth one-tenth of a cent, coined as early as the 12th century B.C.; strung on cords through holes with which they are pierced; in later times worn as amulets.

The golden age of China’s later ancient literature, the period of the Tang dynasty (620-907 A.D.), when the imperial armies penetrated to Samarcand and Bokhara in Turkestan. Le Taipih, the Chinese Anacreon, the greatest poet of this period; but even he seldom rises above mediocrity.

The Semitic Languages, enumerated on page 16, have certain peculiarities in common:—

They are triliteral, i. e. three consonants enter into the composition of every root. Consonants only are represented by letters; vowels, indicated by points and lines, play a subordinate part. The latter vary according to the relation to be[Pg 84] expressed; while the consonant root, which conveys the leading idea, remains for the most part unchanged. Thus, in Arabic, the notion of bloodshed is expressed by the triple root q t l; quatl is murder; quitl, enemy; uqtul means to kill; quatala, he kills. The picturesque compounds, so convenient in the Indo-European languages, are here wanting.

The Semitic verb is deficient in mood-forms, and has in general only two tenses, which represent action completed and action continuing. Case, in the later developments of the different languages, is left undistinguished. Brevity is gained, but at the expense of precision.

Distribution of the Semitic Tongues.—The great divisions of the Semitic family of languages are designated as Northern and Southern Semitic. They include the Arama’ic, Hebræo-Phœnician, and Arabic, which are much more alike than the Aryan tongues. Assyrio-Babylonian occupies a peculiar position between the Northern and Southern Semitic groups.

Aramaic (from the Hebrew Arâm—highlands) was spoken in northern Syria, Mesopotamia, and Babylonia. A dialect of it, the Jews gradually adopted after their return from captivity at Babylon (536 B.C.), retaining the Hebrew as their sacred language, but speaking and writing in Aramaic somewhat modified by Greek. Aramaic, therefore, was the tongue in which our Lord and his disciples conversed.

The Hebræo-Phœnician was spread over Palestine, and included the dialects of the Ammonites, Moabites, and Philis’tines. Samaritan was a development of the Western Aramaic, corrupted by the speech of foreign settlers introduced into the land of Israel by the Assyrians, to replace the Ten Tribes whom they had transplanted beyond the Euphrates.

The softer Arabic, musical by reason of its preponderance of vowel sounds, was carried from Arabia into Africa, where it was long the language of the cultivated Ethiopians, and where it still survives in its Abyssinian derivatives, the Amharic, etc.

The Ancient Hebrew shares the imperfections of the Semitic[Pg 85] group to which it belongs. It is one of the oldest members of this family, and was long thought to have been the original language of the human race. Its name is derived by some from Heber, ancestor of Abraham and consequently of the people who spoke the classical tongue of the Old Testament; while by many it is believed to mean belonging to the other side, that is, of the Jordan—an epithet applicable to the Chosen People as coming from beyond that river to dispossess the Canaanitish tribes.

The Semitic Family of Languages.

In the days of the patriarch Abraham, whose father dwelt in “Ur of the Chaldees” (see Map, p. 105), about 2000 B.C., the Semitic dialects differed slightly, if at all. Recently sep[Pg 86]arated from the primitive stock, they possessed the same roots, the same grammatical forms and inflections, and conspicuously agreed in regard to rules of order and construction.

The meagre vocabulary and other defects of the Hebrew are counterbalanced by its euphony, simplicity, and power of poetical expression. Conciseness is its crowning merit. A single sonorous word often conveys an idea that would require a clause of four or five words in English. The whole range of literature in other fields affords no such examples of majestic thought, grand imagery, and impetuous, heart-warming outpourings of soul, as the poetry of that sublime Hebrew tongue which was developed by a simple race of shepherds beneath the mild skies of western Asia.

Hebrew Shekel.Hebrew Shekel.

The Hebrew Alphabet.—The Hebrews early profited by the invention of their Phœnician kinsmen, borrowing from them an alphabet which, as may be seen on the opposite page, they changed little from the original. After the Captivity (588-536 B.C.), the more elegant square characters from the Aramaic took the place of the ancient letters; the latter, however, for reasons political as well as religious, were reproduced on the shekels coined during the period of Jewish independence under the Maccabees (168-37 B.C.), by which time the written language was universally expressed in Aramaic characters. (See Land’s “Hebrew Grammar.”)

The oldest Hebrew alphabet (see Table) contained no more than ten or twelve letters; the number was afterward increased to twenty-two—consonants all. These were qualified by vowel sounds, denoted by vowel-points placed over or under the consonants to which they belonged. Capitals there were none.—While some have held that the names[Pg 87] of the letters were given them arbitrarily, merely to facilitate the memorizing of the alphabet, others believe that a connection existed between their names and their forms: that, for example, A, called Aleph (ox), was originally a rough picture of an ox’s head; that B was the representation of a house or tent, such being the meaning of its name Beth, etc.

ANCIENT ALPHABETS.

[Pg 88]

Spirit of Hebrew Poetry.—The most ancient Semitic poetry is found in the pure musical Hebrew of the oldest books of the Bible. Nearly one half of the Old Testament was in verse, mainly lyrical, ranging from the simplest song or dirge to the sublimest strains of prophecy; yet didactic poetry has also a place, for in it were embodied the proverbs of Israel’s wise men.

Other literatures boast of their epics and dramas; but the Hebrew, without either, has exerted a far more exalted influence on the human mind than any other. In vain do we search the Veda and the Avesta for conceptions as grand as those in the Scriptures. God is apprehended in all his majesty by the Hebrew bards, and speaks through them to nations that are yet to be. The Bible poets wrote not merely for the purpose of pleasing; as teachers and prophets, they had a divine mission and a loftier aim. The graces of rhetoric were employed to present their impressive subjects in the strongest and clearest light. Frequent metaphors embellished their style, and striking personifications endowed it with life and energy. Imagery drawn from the picturesque scenes about them,—the hills, the streams, the plains of Palestine,—or from their every-day employments as tillers and herdsmen, they used without stint; while parallelism, whether it consisted in the repetition of the same sentiment or in a contrasting of opposite ideas, was a peculiar beauty of their poetry.

Their language significant and striking, their thoughts lofty and solemn, their tone severely moral, their themes of the deepest interest to man, what wonder that the Hebrew poets[Pg 89] tower above the sublimest writers of other times and countries? “Whatever in our literature,” says Taylor, “possesses most of simple majesty and force, whatever is most fully fraught with feeling, whatever draws away the soul from its cleaving to the dust and lifts the thoughts toward a brighter sphere—all such elements we owe directly or indirectly to the Hebrew Scriptures, especially to those parts that are in spirit and form poetic.”

Parallelism has been mentioned as a distinctive feature of Hebrew poetry. This is defined by Bishop Lowth as “a certain equality, resemblance, or relationship between the members of a period, so that things shall answer to things and words to words, as if fitted to each other by a kind of rule or measure.”

Parallelism may be either cumulative, antithetical, or constructive. In the first, a proposition, after having been once stated, is repeated in equivalent words of similar construction, as in Isaiah, lv., 6, 7:—

Antithetical parallelism is similar, except that the two periods correspond with each other by an opposition of sentiments and terms; as in Proverbs, xxvii., 6:—

In the third kind of parallelism, there is neither correspondence nor opposition in the sentiment, but simply a similarity of construction in the two periods, as in Psalm xix., 8, 9:—

DAWN OF HEBREW LITERATURE.

There is good reason for believing that the ancient Hebrews had an extensive literature; but out of their “multitude of books,” all that have descended to us are those of the Old Testament. Their secular poetical and prose works are wholly lost.

The Books of Moses.—The earliest Hebrew writer of whom we have positive knowledge was Moses, author of the greater part of the Pentateuch[10] (five volumes—the first five books of the Bible), or, as it was called by the Jews, the Book of the Law.

The first book of the Pentateuch, Genesis (the generation), tells us all that we know of the Creation, the Deluge, the Confusion of languages, the Dispersion, and the lives of the patriarchs, whose history it sketches till the death of Joseph in Egypt, keeping everywhere prominent the relation of Jehovah to the chosen race.

Exodus (the going out) continues the story of the Hebrews from the death of Joseph, relates their oppression under the Pharaoh Ram’eses the Great, their miraculous escape from the land of bondage in the reign of his successor, and the promulgation of the commandments on Mount Sinai. It is in this book that we catch an early glimpse of Hebrew poetry in[Pg 91] the Song of Moses and his sister Miriam—a magnificent triumphal ode, the most ancient in any language. The rescued host pour forth in unison their joy and gratitude; while in response the exulting prophetess, timbrel in hand, leads the women of Israel, on the shore of that sea which had engulfed their enemies, to celebrate their deliverance with sacred dance and rapturous verse. (See Exodus, chapter xv.)

Leviticus (the book pertaining to the Levites) consists of regulations relative to worship and sacrifice, together with historical items touching the consecration of Aaron, his first offering, and the destruction of two of his sons for their impiety. Here is developed the theocratic system that lay at the base of Hebrew society.

Numbers takes its name from the numbering of the Israelites in the wilderness of Sinai; it gives an account of this census, and continues their history during thirty-seven years of subsequent wandering, up to their arrival on the borders of the Promised Land. In this book there are several brief specimens of poetry, commemorative of victory, of the digging of a well in the wilderness, etc.

In Deuteronomy (the second law) the law is repeated and explained by Moses in three fervid discourses, just before the entrance of the Hebrews into Canaan. The Pentateuch closes with a simple but inexpressibly grand outburst of the Hebrew legislator in song (chapter xxxii.), the blessings he pronounces upon the twelve tribes, and an account of his death.

Of the facts presented in these first five books of the Old Testament, some are confirmed by hieroglyphic inscriptions and the traditions of different nations; but of the greater part we should have had no knowledge without the inspired narrative. Aside, therefore, from its religious bearing, the Pentateuch is invaluable as an historical record of primeval ages; while its clear, concise, dignified style, rich with noble[Pg 92] thoughts expressed in the venerable manner of antiquity, is worthy of its sublime subjects.

The Historical Books.—The Pentateuch is followed by the historical books of Scripture, which, though extending into the silver age, will for convenience’ sake be here considered together. With the Pentateuch they form a complete summary of national history, in which are interwoven religious matters that explain and illustrate it. We may glance briefly at their authorship and contents.

The Book of Joshua, classed with the Pentateuch (the Torah, or Law) under the name of Hexateuch, covers a period of twenty-five years (about 1425 B.C.); it relates to the conquest of Canaan and the partition of that promised land among the twelve tribes, closing with the farewell exhortation and death of the great leader. Judges, ascribed to the Prophet Samuel, continues the history of the nation to about 1100 B.C.; it tells how the Jews, as a punishment for their apostasy, were at different times reduced to servitude by their heathen enemies, and on their repentance delivered by heroes who became their Judges. Ruth, regarded by the ancient Jews as belonging to the Book of Judges, is of unknown date and authorship, though attributed by some to Samuel. It is an exquisite idyl of domestic life, designed to show the origin of King David. (See Chapman’s “Hebrew Idyls.”)

The Books of Samuel, the first portion of which Samuel probably composed himself, give an account of the magistracy of that prophet and the reigns of Saul and David. The Books of the Kings dwell upon the glorious reign of Solomon, and then take us through the divided lines of Israel and Judah, till both were finally overthrown and carried into captivity; Jewish tradition points to Jeremiah as the author of these books. Ezra seems to have written most of the Chronicles, which is supplementary to the Kings; he was also the author of the book that bears his name. This and Nehemiah[Pg 93] describe the return of the Jews from their captivity in Babylon, and the restoration of the temple worship at Jerusalem. The Book of Esther is devoted to a touching episode of the reign of Ahasuerus, king of Persia, supposed to be identical with Xerxes, the son of Darius Hystaspis.

The Book of Job is worthy of special mention, as the most artistic specimen of Hebrew genius. Whether this unique poem was the work of Job himself in his later days, or of some other whose name is lost, its author was evidently proficient in all the scientific knowledge of his time. The hero, a native of northern Arabia, whose name has become a synonym for patient suffering, is reduced to the very depths by family bereavements, bodily anguish, and the well-meant reproaches of his friends; yet his faith in God is unshaken, and in the end that faith is amply vindicated and rewarded. (See Dr. Rossiter W. Raymond’s “The Book of Job.”)

Bold imagery, vividness of description, life-like delineations of lofty passion as well as the gentler emotions, combined with master-touches of dramatic art, stamp this poem as the greatest in Oriental literature. Its passages relating to the war-horse, behemoth, and leviathan (chapters xxxix., xl., xli.), are cited by writers on the sublime as among the grandest illustrations of their subject; and its descriptions of the Deity, as manifested in his works, exhibit the noblest conceptions of the Infinite that man’s finite intellect is capable of forming.

GOLDEN AGE OF HEBREW POETRY.

The Psalms.—The flourishing period of David (1085-1015 B.C.) ushers in the Augustan age of Hebrew poetry. The Lyric was then carried to perfection by the poet-king himself and his contemporaries in their Psalms,—“those delicate, fragrant, and lovely flowers,” as Luther calls them, “springing up out of all manner of beautiful joyous thoughts toward God and his goodness.” The strains of “Israel’s sweet psalmist,”[Pg 94] who began as a shepherd-lad to cultivate the arts of music and poetry, breathe a spirit of plaintive tenderness that distinguishes them from the statelier productions of other contributors to Hebrew psalmody.

A utopian theory of the great Plato, but one that he declared could be carried out only by “a god or some divine one,” was the training of the Grecian youth in odes like the Psalms: and this—the religious instruction of the people—was the very object of the Hebrew lyrics. The plan of the Greek philosopher had been put in practice centuries before his day in Palestine, and on a far grander scale than ever he imagined. In the royal city of Jerusalem, four thousand musicians appointed by David chanted hymns of triumph and praise, to the accompaniment of harp and flute; while in the gorgeous temple of David’s son, the sublime worship of Jehovah challenges description.

For three thousand years, these Hebrew anthems, unapproached by the religious songs of any other age or people, have been the glory of the Jewish and the Christian Church, eloquently testifying that “there has been one people among the nations—one among the millions of the worshippers of stocks—taught of God.”

Many of the Psalms date from David’s time; one (Psalm xc.) carries us as far back as Moses, and others were as late as the Captivity. They were probably arranged as we now have them in the fifth century B.C.; though certain critics refer some of them to the Maccabean period (second century B.C.).

Elegiac Poetry.—King David was also a writer of elegy, that kind of song in which the Hebrew poets and prophets poured out their grief in the unaffected language of nature. Some of his Psalms are beautiful specimens of this species of poetry, especially Psalm xlii., “As the hart panteth after the water-brooks,” composed during his exile among the mountains of Lebanon. Another exquisite and[Pg 95] pathetic elegy of this poet, rendered below in English verse by Lowth, is the

LAMENTATION FOR SAUL AND JONATHAN.

Didactic Poetry.—In the golden age, didactic poetry also reached the acme of perfection. The Proverbs that then[Pg 96] flowed from the inspired pen of Solomon, prince of didactic writers as his father was of lyric poets, are too well known, with all their richness of practical wisdom, to require more than a passing mention. Expressed concisely in energetic words, according to the different forms of parallelism, these moral precepts are indeed “like apples of gold in baskets of silver.”

Of the same general scope as the Proverbs, and by the same author, is Ecclesiastes, or the Preacher. In this book is shown the vanity of earthly pleasures; and the whole duty of man is summed up in the sentence, “Fear God and keep his commandments.” The Book of Ecclesiastes has been attributed to Solomon’s latter days; the Proverbs, to his prime; while that sweet pastoral, the Song of Songs—singularly beautiful, whether taken literally as an exponent of happy wedded love, or allegorically as delineating the mutual attachment of God and his people—was the joyous outburst of his youth. Solomon was also the author of a thousand canticles and various works on miscellaneous subjects; books of making which, he tells us, there was no end.

Prophetic Poetry of the Golden Age.—The writings of the earlier prophets, florid with high-wrought imagery, revived for a time the waning glories of the golden age. Foremost of this class in eloquence of diction, sublimity of thought, and versatility of genius, stands Isaiah. Majesty united with elaborate finish; a harmony that delights the soul; a variety that imparts freshness without detracting from dignity; simplicity and unvarying purity of language,—conspire to make the lyric verse of “the Evangelical Prophet” the most appropriate embodiment of the awful messages of God to the Jews, the promise of a Messiah and universal peace.

After a career of nearly seventy years, Isaiah sealed his great work with his blood in the reign of the idolatrous Manasseh (698-643 B.C.). His mind has been pronounced “one of the most sublime and variously gifted instruments which[Pg 97] the Spirit of God has ever employed to pour forth its Voice upon the world.”

Even the minor prophets, if we except Jonah the oldest, exhibit in their compositions unwonted grandeur and elegance: Hosea, with his sententious style; Amos, “the herdman and gatherer of sycamore fruit;” Joel and Micah; Habakkuk, whose fervent prayer to the Almighty is graced with the loftiest embellishments, and Nahum, perhaps the boldest and most ardent of all.

And so the Golden Age of Hebrew Literature ends. We know only its sacred poetry, and much indeed of this has disappeared.[11] The harvest and vintage songs which wakened the echoes amid the vales of Palestine, the pastorals that accompanied the shepherd’s pipe on the hill-sides of Ephraim, all are lost forever; “the voice of mirth and the voice of gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the bride,” were forgotten in the streets of Jerusalem, when the land was desolate under the Babylonian and “the daughters of music were brought low.”

SILVER AGE.

The Prophets.—The names of three great prophets—Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel—illuminate the first page in the history of the decline of Hebrew literature. But in their writings, and notably so in those of the later minor prophets, poetry was evidently on the wane. They lived in a degenerate day. About half of the prophecy of Jeremiah, denouncing the judgment of Heaven on the disobedient people, is poetry; he lacks the pomp and majesty of Isaiah, but excels in stirring the gentler emotions.

His Lamentations are beautiful elegies on the fall of his country and the desecration of the temple; every letter seems “written with a tear and every word the sound of a broken[Pg 98] heart.” The verses of the several chapters in the original begin with consecutive letters of the alphabet, that they may be the more easily memorized, for it was intended that the sins and sufferings of the Jewish nation should never be forgotten. Can anything be more touching than the personification of Jerusalem, sitting as a solitary widow on the ground and mourning for her children?

Ezekiel and Daniel were carried captives to Babylon, where they made known their prophetic visions. The former wrote partly in poetry, characterized by a rough vehemence peculiar to himself. The Book of Daniel, in which history is combined with prophecy, is in prose, and a portion of it in the Aramaic language. (Consult Keith’s “Evidence of Prophecy.”)

The Tomb of Ezra.

Another writer of distinguished merit, belonging to this age, was the scribe and priest Ezra (already mentioned), who was[Pg 99] permitted to return from Babylon to Jerusalem with a company of his people, 458 B.C. He settled the canon of Scripture, restoring and editing the whole of the Old Testament.

The Apocrypha (secret writings) consist chiefly of the stories of To’bit and Judith, the first and second books of Esdras and of the Maccabees, Ba’ruch, the Wisdom of Solomon, and Ecclesiasticus or the Wisdom of the Son of Sirach. Composed during the three centuries immediately preceding the Christian Era, they bear internal evidence, in their lack of the ancient poetical power, of belonging to an age of literary decline. They were mostly included in the canon of Scripture by the Council of Trent in 1545, but are rejected by Protestants as uninspired.

Ecclesiasticus, best of the Apocryphal books, is full of moral, political, and religious precepts, its object being to teach true wisdom and its style resembling the didactic poetry of Solomon. The following fine passage, versified by Lowth, personifies

WISDOM.

The Talmud.—Our treatise would be incomplete without some notice of the mysterious book whose name heads this paragraph,—the Talmud. Comparatively unknown except in name for centuries, it was repeatedly suppressed in the Dark Ages by popes and kings, as likely to be dangerous to Christianity. (See Dr. Jastrow’s “Dictionary of the Talmud.”)

Talmud means learning. It is essentially a digest of law, civil and criminal, and a collection of traditions orally preserved. It consists of two parts, viz., the Mishna, or earlier text; and the Gemara (ghe-mah’ră), a commentary on the Mishna. The age that gave birth to the Talmud was the period after the Captivity, when a passionate love for their sacred and national writings animated the Jews restored to their country and its institutions. Hundreds of learned men, all great in their day, who treasured in their memories the traditions of a thousand years, contributed to its pages.

The Talmud was a cyclopædia treating of every subject, even down to gardening and the manual arts; it depicts incidentally the social life of the people, not of the Jews alone, but of other nations also. It is enlivened by parables, jests,[Pg 101] and fairy-tales, ethical sayings, and proverbs; the style is now poetical, anon sublime; and there may be gathered amid its wilderness of themes “some of the richest and most precious fruits of human thought and fancy.”

After two unsuccessful attempts, the Talmud was finally systemized in a code by the Saint Jehuda (about 200 A.D.). A remarkable correspondence exists between it and the Gospel writings, explained by the fact that both reflect in a measure the same times. (Read Sekles’s “Poetry of the Talmud.”)

EXTRACTS FROM THE TALMUD.

RETURNING THE JEWELS.

THE PAINTED FLOWERS.

NOTES ON WRITING, EDUCATION, ETC., AMONG THE HEBREWS.

Cuneiform Letters.—North of the Persian Gulf, and drained by the rivers Euphrates and Tigris, lay Chalde’a, or Babylonia, the “Land of Shi’nar” (country of the two rivers). Here arose the earliest cities, amid a population principally Turanian and Semitic, with a limited intermixture of the Aryan element. A Semitic dialect prevailed among the people at[Pg 105] large; but the Turanian (Non-Semitic or Ural-Altaic) Chaldees, to whom Babylonia was indebted for its aboriginal civilization, through the centuries of their ascendency, political and intellectual, not only kept alive their native tongue in conversation with each other, but, inscribing it on imperishable monuments, caused it to endure through all time.

ASSYRIA and the ADJACENT COUNTRIES

To these Turanians the honor of having invented cuneiform letters must be conceded; an honor, indeed, when we remember that theirs was possibly the most ancient device for embodying human thought. The characters, called wedge-formed or arrow-headed, they appear to have brought with them into the Euphrates valley from the more northerly country which they previously occupied; and their Semitic co-residents in Babylonia were not slow in adopting the ingenious system which they had elaborated. (Consult Budge’s “Babylonian Life,” By-Paths of Bible Knowledge Series, p. 100.)

The cuneiform characters, like the hieroglyphics, were at first rude representations of objects, but in most cases the resemblance to the original was soon lost. In some archaic forms, however, it may be readily detected; as in the charac[Pg 106]ter for fish, . The common signs eventually acquired phonetic values. The Assyrian writing is made up of ideograms, phonograms, and determinatives.

When by the victory of Alexander at Arbe’la (331 B.C.) the great Persian Empire fell, cuneiform writing ceased to be practised, and cuneiform literature was buried in the mounds of Assyria and Babylonia for two thousand years. During the present century it has been disinterred by inquisitive scholars, whose labors have resulted in the restoration of a forgotten history, through the wonderful literature of a people long known only in name. (See Sayce’s “Hibbert Lectures.”)

ASSYRIO-BABYLONIAN LITERATURE.

Writing Materials.—The cuneiform letters heretofore spoken of as in use among the Persians at a later date (p. 66) were doubtless originally intended to be cut on rocks with chisels, and hence were angular instead of round. But the ancient Babylonians preferred bricks and tablets of clay, on which, when moist and soft, they traced their legends, annals, and scientific items, with an ivory or bronze stylus, hardening the surface thus inscribed by drying in the sun. The tablets, from one inch in length upward, are pillow-shaped and covered with characters so minute as to be almost illegible without a glass. After drying, to insure their preservation, they were often enclosed in cases of clay, and on these the inscriptions were duplicated. Such are known as “case-tablets.”

The Assyrians used similar kiln-baked tablets, and, besides, carved their records exquisitely on the stone panels of their palaces, and on colossal human-headed bulls. The tablets above described, together with terra-cotta cylinders, formed the books of this inventive nation, who also engraved with wonderful delicacy glass, metals, the amethyst, jasper, and onyx.

[Pg 107]

Stone slabs were generally reserved for royal inscriptions; the literary classes of Assyria preferred the cheaper clay, on which they could write more rapidly and quite as legibly with their triangular instruments. Something like paper or parchment seems to have been used to a very limited extent; but if so, it has entirely disappeared. It is also thought that the Chaldeans may have practised a simple method of printing, as wedge-like types of stone have been found among the ruins of their cities.

Golden Age of Babylonian Literature (2000-1550 B.C.).—Not a little of the Assyrio-Babylonian literature has been recovered; but a mine of literary wealth in the valley of the Euphrates still awaits the persevering student, for before 2000 B.C. important works were written in Chaldea. In the twentieth century, a golden age dawned on this ancient land; its great cities became centres of literary refinement, as well as of commerce and art, and a lofty poetical style characterized the writings of the time. Standard texts on religion, science, and history were then and shortly thereafter produced, the copying of which appears to have satisfied the ambition of subsequent generations.

In 1887, numerous Babylonian tablets, dating from the 15th century B.C., were found at Tell-Amarna, Egypt. They contain letters addressed by Asiatic kings to the third and fourth Amenophis (a portion of the correspondence relating to the marriage of an Egyptian monarch with the princess of Mitanni), and imply that the cuneiform writing of Babylonia was in that day the vehicle of correspondence, as was the Aramaic in the time of Persian supremacy.

Among early specimens of Chaldean writing is a set of bricks, discovered near the site of E’rech. They are thought to have been made about 2008 B.C. As these bricks illustrate the most ancient cuneiform character, two of them are here presented, accompanied with a translation.

[Pg 108]

Chaldean Bricks.

Chaldean Bricks.

“Beltis, his lady, has caused Urukh, the pious chief and king of Ur, king of the land of Accad, to build a temple to her.”

FROM A TABLET OF BABYLONIAN LAWS.

Babylonian literature was rich in the departments of law, mathematics, astrology, grammar, and history. Nor was fiction wanting; fables, in which the lower animals carried on spirited dialogues, were favorites with the people. At a very early date, the inscribed tablets and cylinders were collected, and the chief cities were made the seats of libraries.

From a volume of Chaldean hymns, somewhat similar to the Rig-Veda, are taken the following verses to the Babylonian Venus:—

[Pg 109]

PRAYER OF THE HEART TO ISTAR.

The Babylonians believed in omens. They gathered auguries from dreams, inspection of the hand, the time of birth, and various phenomena, establishing a national system of divination not without its amusing features. For instance, we have the following

OMENS CONNECTED WITH DOGS.

Many charms and exorcisms appear in the ancient language of Babylonia, disease being attributed to possession by evil spirits. Specimens follow.

BABYLONIAN EXORCISMS.

A belief in a future life is expressed in the Poem on the Descent of Istar, the moon-god’s daughter, to Hades, “the land whence none return,” where “the dead outnumber the living;” and further in the so-called Nimrod-Epic, the most ancient approach to epic poetry known to exist, embodying the Babylonian story of Izdubar (identified with Nimrod)—his rejection of the suit of the goddess Istar, and his victory over the human-headed bull sent to revenge the slight. Nimrod is ferried across the waters of the dead to the shores of the regions of the blessed, where he recognizes his ancestor, Samas-napistim, and exclaims:

Chambers of Records at Nineveh.—The Semites who, as the sacred historian informs us, left the land of Shinar to found Nineveh and the neighboring cities, carried with them the civilization and literary culture of the Chaldeans. The earliest permanent seat of letters was Ca’lah (see Map, p. 105), where, during the reign of Shalmane’ser II. (860-824 B.C.) many clay tablets borrowed from the Babylonians were copied by[Pg 111] Assyrian scribes. This same king erected at Calah an obelisk of black marble—one of the few Assyrian monuments of its kind commemorative of national triumphs.

The library thus begun at Calah was enlarged under succeeding kings. Removed at length to Nineveh, it there attained vast proportions through the efforts of that munificent patron of letters, Sardanapa’lus (Assur-bani-pal), (668-626 B.C.). The number of engraved tablets reached ten thousand.

Here were grammars[12] and lexicons, law-books and scientific treatises, histories, astronomical and arithmetical works, songs, prayers, hymns sometimes approaching the Hebrew sacred lyrics in sublimity, books of charms and omens, natural histories, botanies, and geographies—a complete encyclopædia of ancient literature. The books of this curious collection were carefully arranged according to their subjects, numbered, catalogued, and placed in charge of librarians. They were public property, intended for the instruction of the people.

Such was the library of Sardanapalus—principally copied from Babylonian texts; such, it was buried beneath the ruins of the palace when “the gates of the rivers were opened and Nineveh became a desolation;” such, it lay amid the débris for centuries, “while the cormorant and the bittern lodged in the upper lintels.”

But the mounds that so long covered the site of Nineveh have recently surrendered their treasures. Clouds that environed the history of the past have been dissipated; ancient nations, for ages wrapped in obscurity, we no longer “see through a glass, darkly;” and the narrative of the inspired writers of the Bible has been in many places confirmed by the inscriptions disentombed in the East. Among the most interesting fragments found scattered through the ruined “Chambers of Records” of the Assyrian palace are the tablets relat[Pg 112]ing to the Creation, the Fall of Man, and the Deluge, copied from Babylonian records hundreds of years older than the Pentateuch.

FROM THE CHALDEAN ACCOUNT OF THE DELUGE.

(Compiled originally about 2000 B.C.)

SPECIMENS OF ASSYRIAN SACRED POETRY.

A PRAYER FOR THE KING.

Here is undoubtedly expressed a belief in the soul’s immortality, which also appears in the following prayer for the spirit of a dying man:—

A PENITENTIAL PSALM.

HITTITE INSCRIPTIONS.

Altaic Hieroglyphs.—Inscriptions on stones and various objects, in an unknown system of hieroglyphics, have been found near Damascus and elsewhere in the East. They have[Pg 114] been ascribed to the Hittites (the Khita of the Egyptian monuments, the Khittim of Scripture), a powerful race of northern Syria, who were constantly at war with the Babylonians, successfully opposed both Assyria and Egypt, and in the thirteenth century B.C. extended their power as far west as the Ægean Sea. It is claimed that the symbols are “the prototypes whence the cuneiform system was developed,” and that the language is an Altaic (Turanian or Accadian) dialect. The date assigned is 1400 B.C. (See opposite engraving of an inscribed stone from Jerabis.) Scholars are now engaged in an attempt to decipher these inscriptions. (The reader is referred to Sayce’s “The Hittites: the Story of a Forgotten Empire.”)

ARABIC LITERATURE.

Himyaritic Inscriptions.—The high-spirited war-loving tribes that roved over the tablelands of Arabia, as well as the more refined inhabitants of her ports on the Red Sea, doubtless cultivated letters. We may suppose the former to have given their florid fancies vent in pastorals, rude songs for the desert bivouac, or triumphal odes. More finished species of poetry would have been congenial to the courtly residents of the cities, whose knowledge of the world was extended by trading expeditions to India, and along the African coast as far as the Mozambique Channel.

Yet of this probable literature we possess little that is older than the era of Mohammed (600 A.D.), at which time the Arabians awoke to a new life, for centuries leading the van of the nations in the march of literature and science. But the little that we have is not without interest.

[Pg 115]

At least eighteen hundred years before the Christian Era, descendants of Joktan, called Sabæans and afterward Himyarites, established themselves in southwestern Arabia; but not until about 800 B.C. do they appear to have gained permanent dominion over the neighboring tribes. Inscriptions in their language, the Sabæan, a Semitic tongue closely related to the Arabic, if not sufficiently like it to be called by the same name, have been found in the lower part of the Arabian peninsula on walls, tombs, dikes, and bronze tablets.

These are the oldest known Arabic writings, and are believed by scholars to date between the 8th century B.C. and the 4th century A.D. Gems have also been discovered, inscribed with these same characters.

PHŒNICIAN LITERATURE.

Its Lost Treasures.—In the most ancient records, the narrow strip of coast between the Lib’anus Mountains and the Mediterranean was recognized as an important centre of civilization. Its cities were seats of art and commerce; Africa, Sicily, and Spain, were dotted with its colonies and trading-stations; the sails of its merchantmen sparkled on every sea; its language was known throughout the ancient world.

It cannot be that a nation so advanced in knowledge was without a literature; and if works on their philosophy and religion, on history, geography, navigation, and agriculture, didactic poems and love-songs, constitute a literature, vast indeed was that of the Phœnicians. No department of science or belles-lettres appears to have been overlooked by their authors.

The famous “Book City,” Kir´jath-Se´pher, which, during the conquest of Canaan, was taken by Othniel the future Judge, is thought to have been a Phœnician town. Its name implies that it was a repository of books, probably public records and works on law—perhaps an Athens to the nations of[Pg 116] Canaan, whither their youth flocked to consult its libraries and receive instruction at its academies. Its valuable collection of manuscripts was doubtless committed to the flames by the Hebrew conqueror.

In like manner, the whole constellation of Phœnician hymns, and lyrics, and prose pieces, has become extinct, except a lonely star left here and there in the works of foreign authors; or a faint light glimmering on some coin or tablet, gem or tombstone.

The only important Phœnician writer known to us is Sanchoni´athon. Fragments of his History, written perhaps in the fourteenth century B.C., have survived through a Greek translation. In accounting for the origin of the universe, Sanchoniathon taught the theory of evolution, that “from certain animals not having sensation, intelligent animals were produced.”

Phœnician Carthage also developed an extensive literature. The records of the city were kept by native historians; and we know that Ma’go’s great work on agriculture, in twenty-eight parts, was highly appreciated at Rome, and there rendered into Latin. When the city of Hannibal fell before her more powerful rival, her vast library was scattered among the African allies of the Romans, and lost to history.

An interesting relic of Carthaginian literature is the Circumnavigation of Hanno, the history of a voyage undertaken in the sixth century B.C. to the coasts of Libya—the oldest history of a voyage existing. This work of Hanno, which used to hang in a temple at Carthage, describes a savage people called Gorillas, whose bodies were covered with hair and who defended themselves with stones. The narrator says: “Three women were taken, but they attacked their conductors with their teeth and hands, and could not be prevailed on to accompany us. Having killed them, we flayed them, and brought their skins with us to Carthage.”

[Pg 117]

NOTES ON ASSYRIO-BABYLONIAN LITERATURE.

The Egyptian Language.—There yet remains one field of Oriental literature for us to visit, and it is specially interesting on account of the valuable treasures it long concealed. These have recently been brought to light in the writings of that people who settled the fertile valley of the Nile in prehistoric times, and adorned the land of Egypt with monuments inscribed with their mysterious characters.

Thousands of inscriptions—some on the walls of vast temples, or of memorial chapels attached to the tombs of private citizens; others hewn in the living rock, or carefully cut on[Pg 118] obelisks of granite with chisels of bronze and steel—have endured to our day; and thousands of papyri have come down to us; some of the rolls many feet in length, and covered with figures of men, birds, insects, and reptiles, in profile, often illuminated with high colors and gold wrought in artistic vignettes. The ingenuity of modern science has wrung from these their secrets, and disclosed a wealth of knowledge in connection with the history, literature, civilization, and religion of the ancient Egyptians.

The Egyptian language is undoubtedly Semitic, and, in its oldest form, perhaps represents the primitive Semitic stock. It contains, however, certain elements that are not Semitic, but that seem to have been derived from a tongue of distinct origin, spoken in the country before its conquest by a Semitic race. The language has therefore been called Egypto-Semitic.

EGYPTIAN WRITING.

Decipherment of the Hieroglyphics.—The decipherment of the Egyptian hieroglyphics will always be regarded as one of the greatest triumphs of the present century. As early as 1652, Kircher (kěěr´ker), a learned German Jesuit, attempted to translate the monumental writing; but, by reason of his absurd renderings, only cast discredit on the science of Egyptology. Scholars of the period preferred the study of Coptic, the language of Egyptian Christianity; it was through their labors in this field that the way was prepared for the final interpretation of the older speech.

The Rosetta Stone.—The finding of the Rosetta Stone, in 1799, led to the brilliant discoveries of the French savant, Champollion (sham-pol´le-on). A French officer, while erecting works at Rosetta, in the delta of the Nile, during Napoleon’s Egyptian campaign, unearthed a piece of black basalt, which contained, in equivalent inscriptions in hieroglyphics, Greek,[Pg 119] and demotic (popular hand), a decree conferring divine honors on Ptolemy V., a monarch of the second century B.C. The meaning of the Greek text being known, the hieroglyphics through it were translated. Thomas Young, an English mathematician, and the French scholar, independently, and almost simultaneously, succeeded in finding a true solution of the problem. Young determined correctly the value of some of the characters; but the result of Champollion’s labors were vastly more important. He not only gave the correct rendering of long inscriptions and of numerous papyri, but pre[Pg 120]pared an Egyptian grammar and a hieroglyphic dictionary that for years were unrivalled as authorities.

The Rosetta Stone.

The famous stone rests on a block of red porphyry in the Egyptian gallery of the British Museum. Dimensions: 3 ft., 1 in. high; 2 ft., 5 in. broad; 6 to 12 in. thick. (Read the “Report of the Committee appointed by the Philomathean Society of the University of Pennsylvania to translate the Inscription on the Rosetta Stone.”)

Champollion’s work was carried on by other scholars after his death. In 1867, Lepsius discovered in the ruins of Tanis a second trilingual inscription, the so-called decree of Cano’pus, the study of which fully confirmed the theories previously advanced. The work of Lepsius gave a new impulse to Egyptian study. His immediate successor in this line of exploration was Mariette, who built up the museum of Boulaq. Many others in France, England, Germany, and America, have devoted their lives to the study of Egypt and her systems of writing. The problem that baffled alike Greeks, Romans, and all subsequent nations, has been solved at last; and the door has been opened to “a library of stones and papyri in myriads of volumes,” in which every branch of literature is represented. The crumbling walls scattered throughout “the Monumental Land” now utter intelligible words; the very implements and toys have their stories to tell; and many a tomb has yielded up its brittle treasure of papyrus, its eulogy or legend, its history or hymn.

System of Writing.—From the earliest times the Egyptians possessed a phonetic system of writing. They had an alphabet of twenty-two characters, consisting of consonants only, which became the basis of the Phœnician, and through it of every ancient and modern European alphabet. Besides these consonants, there were in use numerous syllabic signs, in which two or three consonant sounds, or a consonant and a vowel sound, were represented by one character. Owing to the absence of vowel signs, it was often next to impossible to discriminate between words composed of the same consonants, but having different significations (as it would be in English, if, for instance, we should write s t r for star, store, stair, or straw, and leave the signification of the three consonants to be determined by the context). To obviate this dif[Pg 121]ficulty, the Egyptians early invented a simple system of determinatives. A determinative is a picture of the object described by the word in question, and was placed after the name. Thus the word rômet, signifying man, was followed by the picture of a kneeling man, as was also every word signifying a male human being or his occupation. After the word himet, signifying woman, after the names of goddesses, the proper names of women, and all words denoting female human beings, was placed the picture of a woman sitting. After the names of gods occurred a typical representation of a god. In like manner, to the names of Egyptian cities was attached the representation of a plan of a city, while the picture of a range of hills distinguished foreign localities (mountains being unknown in the Nile Valley).

Some of these determinatives in time came to be used instead of the words they originally determined; and thus arose word-signs (ideograms), which, though at first comparatively few, soon increased in number. In this way, the picture of the city’s plan, originally a mere determinative, was eventually used as the written sign of the word city itself. The Egyptian system of writing is thus extremely complicated, consisting, as it does, of an alphabet, syllabic signs, and word-signs (ideograms), supplemented by a system of determinatives. The whole number of signs exceeds 2000. (See Moldehnke’s “Language of the Ancient Egyptians.”)

Hieroglyphics.—The oldest form of Egyptian writing is called hieroglyphic;[13] its characters are well-drawn pictures of natural objects; but these pictures had no ideographic values. They were originally, as above stated, partly deter[Pg 122]minative in their nature. The oldest hieroglyphical texts that have come down to us have been referred to the II. Dynasty (now estimated at about 4000 B.C.). The youngest texts date from the period of the Roman Empire.

The inconvenience experienced in writing the hieroglyphics early led to the invention of abbreviated forms. These were of two kinds, viz., the linear hieroglyphics, and a derivative therefrom, the cursive hieratic character, suitable for rapid writing. On some of the stone blocks in the Pyramid of Cheops (ke’ops), the monarch’s name is inscribed in hieratic characters; while the oldest texts of the so-called Book of the Dead are in linear hieroglyphics, which remained the favorite form for this religious work, as well as for most funeral papyri. There are two kinds of hieratic—one closely resembling the old linear hieroglyphics, and in common use during the Middle Empire (2100-1700 B.C.); the other, a simplified and abbreviated form, introduced early in the period styled the New Empire (about 1530 B.C.). From this second form of hieratic, the Phœnicians derived their alphabet (see p. 20, and plate p. 87). In the seventh century B.C., the hieratic gave place to the still simpler demotic, which has not inaptly been called Egyptian short-hand.

LITERARY REMAINS.

Egyptian literature, like other ancient literatures, passed through periods of development and decay. It had its dawn or archaic period, its classical and Augustan era, and its age of decline.

The Archaic Age of Egyptian Literature was the epoch of the Old Empire (3800-2400 B.C.) From this remote period there have come down to us mainly inscriptions carved on the walls of private tombs and royal pyramids. The earliest religious writings, comprising the oldest portions of the Book of the Dead, date also from this time; and a few popular[Pg 123] songs remain, but they are difficult of interpretation. There is further a compilation of maxims, attributed to Prince Ptahhôtep, who lived about 2500 B.C. The style of the archaic period is simple, clear, and forcible; the writings are, in the main, intelligible. As specimens, we present the entire text of one inscription, with extracts from another:

INSCRIPTION ON THE SARCOPHAGUS OF KING MENKAURÂ (3700 B.C.)

FROM THE INSCRIPTION OF UNA,
A GENERAL OF THE VI. DYNASTY (2400 B.C.).

The first extract is of interest as being a translation of the oldest religious text yet found. (On the monuments, consult “Records of the Past,” 1874-1889; and Maspero’s “Les Contes Populaires de l’Egypte.”)

Classical Age of Egyptian Literature.—After the Archaic period there is a great blank in Egyptian history; but about 2100 B.C. we begin again with trustworthy accounts. It would appear that Egypt had been subjected, at the close of[Pg 124] Dynasty VI., by foreign invaders, who were expelled by the Theban princes of Dynasty XI. The final regeneration of the empire, however, was accomplished by Amenemhât I., the founder of Dynasty XII., which, with the following, covers the period commonly called the Middle Empire (2100-1800 B.C.), at the close of which Egypt fell a prey to the Hyksos, or Shepherd Kings.

This epoch was regarded by later native writers as the classical age of their literature. It is represented by large numbers of inscriptions, and some remarkable papyri. Among the latter are the so-called Prisse papyrus,[15] a collection of ill understood moral maxims attributed to Prince Ptahhôtep; and the memoirs of Prince Saneha, a noble of the time, who was forced to fly from Egypt, and for many years lived among the Bedouins of Asia. Other works of the period are “The Instructions of Amenemhât I. to his son Usertesen I.,” the oldest version of the famous “Minstrel’s Song” (sometimes called the “Festal Dirge”), and several fairy stories, notably the “Tale of Snake Island.” The style of the literature is obscure. Much of it was unintelligible even to scholars of the succeeding periods.

Under the Hyksos, phenomenal encouragement appears to have been given to the study of science. A mathematical hand-book of considerable merit reflects the tendencies of the time, as does more markedly the interesting “Papyrus Ebers,”[16] the oldest medical work in the world—both dating from the 17th century B.C.

Selections from two prose works, and a poem entire, follow, in illustration of the style of the Classical Age:

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF PRINCE SANEHA.

[Pg 125]

THE TALE OF SNAKE ISLAND.

This charming tale relates how a treasury official is wrecked on an island in the Red Sea, while on his way to the mines of Sinai. The island is ruled by a great serpent, and inhabited only by snakes. The official remains for some time the guest of the prince, and is then dismissed loaded with presents.

THE MINSTREL’S SONG (2150 B.C.).

Golden Age of Egyptian Literature.—With the expulsion of the Hyksos by Theban kings (1530 B.C.), the New Empire began; it continued until about 1080 B.C., and was contemporaneous with the Golden Age of Egyptian letters. Under the New Empire, the Egyptian dominion was extended eastward into Asia, and far to the south in Ethiopia. Foreign successes kindled the native imagination; hence the general tone of gayety which pervades the literature of the period. Religious works naturally occupy the first place. They comprise commentaries on the older theological writings embodied in the Book of the Dead,[17] long rituals and liturgies, and numerous sublime hymns to the gods.

[Pg 127]

Papyrus, from the Collection of the New York Historical Society.

The secular literature is peculiarly brilliant. Magnificent hymns to the kings, legendary accounts of historical events like “The Taking of Joppe” and “The Expulsion of the Hyksos,” charmingly told fairy tales, accounts of travel and adventure, and spirited lyrics—give us an exalted opinion of the literary ability of Egyptian writers. Even an epic is not wanting, if we may so call the poetic description of the battle of Rameses II. with the Hittites. The inscriptions are of great value, for it is from them we have derived our knowledge of the history of the period. Both kings and private[Pg 128] citizens have left coherent accounts. Nor was science neglected. Several medical papyri have been found, and in certain tombs have been preserved veritable treatises on astronomy and long astronomical tables. The style is attractive, clear, and vigorous, owing to the fact that the grammatical forms have increased in number, thus permitting a more easy and varied expression. (See Erman’s “Ægypten,” vol. ii., p. 442). Literary specimens follow:

HYMN TO THE SUN GOD RÂ.
(FROM THE BOOK OF THE DEAD.)

The genius of the poets of the Golden Age may be estimated from the following verses discovered on a monumental tablet among the ruins of Thebes. They are represented as addressed by Amen-Râ (ah’men rah), the supreme god of that city, to Thothmes III., under whom (15th century B.C.) Egypt rose to the zenith of her military greatness, and, according to a popular saying of the day, “placed her frontier where it pleased herself.” The hymn is peculiarly beautiful in the original, by reason of the harmonious cadence of its periods, and that parallelism or “balance of clauses and ideas” which is largely characteristic of Oriental poetry.[18]

HYMN TO THOTHMES III.

It was by Thothmes III. that the obelisk conveyed from Alexandria to the United States and erected in Central Park, New York (1880), was inscribed with hieroglyphics and set up among “the images of On.” Rameses II. subsequently added to the inscription of Thothmes. (Read Dr. Moldehnke’s “The New York Obelisk.”)

AN EGYPTIAN EPIC.

Among the relics of this age of literary culture are several copies of an epic celebrating the prowess of Rameses the Great in a war with the Hittites—the only representative of its class in all the literature that has been recovered. It has been compared to the Iliad, but lacks many of the qualities which have rendered that poem immortal. The grand central scene, vividly portrayed by the hand of a master artist, discloses the king, forsaken by his cowardly troops in the heat of battle, calling on Amen for aid, and with the god’s assistance discomfiting single-handed the hostile multitude.

THE TALE OF THE TWO BROTHERS.

It is a curious fact that, with few exceptions, we are left in ignorance of the names of the Egyptian authors. The papyri generally conclude with a remark to the effect that they have been copied at the instance of the royal scribes.

The Period of Decline began about 1080 B.C. Demotic literature contains but two noteworthy works—“The Romance of Setna,” a weird tale of magic, and a half-legendary history known as the “Demotic Chronicles.” Demotic fables, in which animals are represented as conversing, appear to have been imitations of Greek originals. The writings of this period are in the main religious.

Such is the literature which the sands of Egypt have yielded to modern research—a literature which, itself of greater antiquity, furnished models even to the nations that we call ancient. While these later nations, judging from the remains that have thus far come to our knowledge, certainly improved on their masters in artistic finish and grandeur of conception,[Pg 131] it must be remembered that we have not yet fully sounded the depths of Egyptian literature. We know not what masterpieces may still lie hid beneath the sand, or bear the mummy company in some undiscovered tomb. We are, indeed, justified in expecting greater works from the land that was the fount of Greek inspiration—the dayspring of knowledge to the Chosen People; whose religion bears in many points a strange analogy to ours; whose lasting structures are emblematic of the soul’s immortality; and whose lotus-blossoms, reopening every morning, symbolize the resurrection from the night of death.

NOTES ON EGYPTIAN EDUCATION, ETC.

[Pg 132]

ANCIENT GREECE
with the
COAST OF ASIA MINOR

Russell & Struthers, N.Y.

Early Settlement of Greece.—While Chaldea and Assyria were rising to greatness, while Phœnicia was winning for herself maritime supremacy, and wonders in art and science were spreading the renown of Egypt throughout the earth, a simple agricultural people was quietly moving westward toward Greece and Italy. In very early times, Aryan tribes known as Pelasgic quitted their habitations in southwestern Bactria (Map, p. 15), and made their way through Persia and Mesopotamia into Asia Minor. Here, on rich tablelands irrigated by the head-waters of streams flowing into the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, presumably among the gold-bearing mountains and vine-grown valleys of Phrygia (see Map), they cultivated their grain, pastured their sheep, made permanent settlements, and rapidly grew into a great nation. These Pelasgic tribes were the ancestors of the Greeks and Romans.

The same general causes that led to emigration from the mother-country crowded toward the coast communities of this Phrygian people, and ultimately obliged them to seek new homes in the west. Perhaps, paddling from island to island in rude galleys, some crossed the Æge’an; perhaps, passing[Pg 134] the Hellespont, some picked their way through Thrace and Macedonia, entered the defiles of the northern mountains, and spread over Greece; while others, more adventurous, pushed their course still farther, and peopled the Italian peninsula.

The Pelasgic tribes were probably the first occupants of Greece and Italy. Earlier emigrants from Asia appear to have found all they desired in the accessible districts of central Europe, and not to have climbed the steep ranges that hemmed in those regions on the south. The Greeks themselves claimed with pride to have sprung from the earth; and a golden grasshopper, worn in the hair as an ornament by the Athenians, pointed to this belief in their autochthony.

The Hellenes.—Fresh bodies of Pelasgians continued to arrive from Asia Minor, until all Greece was populated with a thrifty race of husbandmen and shepherds. Upon this primitive Pelasgian stock was afterward engrafted a branch called Hellenic, identical with it in origin, but forced to a higher state of development in the garden of Asiatic culture, and ready to burst into blossom on the soil of Greece. The new-comers were the Helle’nes, a people of greater vigor, physical and intellectual. Mingling with their Pelasgian kinsmen in the Grecian peninsula, they formed a new nation, endowed with fresh life; and the Pelasgic dialect, modified and energized by their more cultivated tongue, was converted into Greek.

The Greeks had a popular proverb, do nothing too much, which they applied in writing as in acting. Pruning away too great exuberance and repressing the Oriental tendency to exaggerate, they reduced everything to the standard of a rigid but elegant correctness. More artistic than the Hindoos, less luxuriant in imagination but with a chaster and severer taste, they established a literature richly furnished in every department, whose influence can be traced in the works of genius that stand out in every age and country. As Professor Jebb says, “the thoughts of the great Greek thinkers have[Pg 135] been bearing fruit in the world ever since they were first uttered.” (See Dr. Curtius’s “History of Greece.”)

Thus in Greece, Aryan energy, freed from the trammels of Oriental despotism, seems first to have found its true development. The facilities which this country enjoyed for intercourse with Egypt and Phœnicia, enabled it to draw from the learning of one, to copy the enterprise and adopt the inventions of the other. This accounts for its having been the seat of the earliest European civilization.

At a later period, we find the Hellenes separated into three great families—the Æolians, occupying generally the north of Greece; the Ionians, distributed over the central portions; and the Dorians, settled in the south (the Peloponnesus, island of Pelops). Connected with these three divisions were as many dialects—Æolic, Ionic, and Doric Greek—of which, Ionic was the softest and most polished. This Ionic, refined and perfected, became what is known as Attic Greek; it was the language of Athens in the golden age of her art and poetry, and for centuries was understood by the educated classes throughout a great part of the civilized world.

These Hellenic dialects were also spoken on the islands of the Ægean and the coast of Asia Minor; for the tide of emigration set back again toward the Asiatic shores, and Æolians, Ionians, and Dorians, returned in great colonies to the neighborhood of their early home.

Ancient Greek is the most musical language of the Indo-European group. Sanscrit indeed excels it in regularity, but offends the ear with its sameness, the constant recurrence of a sounds wearying the European reader. No such monotonous repetition mars the harmony of Greek, which, on the other hand, presents a pleasing variety in its vowel sounds, its numerous diphthongs, and consonant combinations. Nor is this variety to be wondered at, for tribes differing in their habits and intellectual traits, mingling on the shores of the Æge[Pg 136]an, contributed different elements to the common language. Above all, the Greeks were gifted with a delicate ear, which led them, in the oral transmission of their earliest poetry, to soften all harshness in their tongue and make it melody itself.

In common with Sanscrit, Greek was well adapted to the formation of compound words by the combining of primitives; but this facility for combination was turned to account only so far as was consistent with clearness and taste; the unwieldy polysyllabic compounds of Sanscrit were wanting. The Greek rivals its Indian sister in luxuriance of inflection also, having five cases, three numbers, and three voices for the verb. Accents were used in later days to denote the peculiar key or tone of voice; for the Greeks appreciated the subtle difference between tone (accent) and quantity in pronunciation, a distinction unrecognized in modern languages.

Greek is universally admired for its dignity, versatility, and precision; its blending of strength and elegance, unity and variety. It is suited to all departments of composition; to the effective expression of the various emotions; to stately prose or simple verse. Its perfection at so early a period, particularly in view of the social condition of the people who spoke it, is a phenomenon which we vainly seek to explain.

The Greek Alphabet.—The Phœnician letters were adopted by the Greeks, legend ascribing their introduction to Cadmus, the storied founder of Thebes (1500 B.C.). Some changes were made in these; new characters were added by the Ionians; and about 400 B.C. the resulting alphabet, consisting of twenty-four letters, was officially adopted at Athens. The resemblance between the Greek and the Phœnician alphabet is obvious; see Table, p. 87.

That there was Pelasgian picture-writing in Greece before the Phœnician alphabet reached that country, is by no means improbable.

The Beginnings of Greek Poetry are found in the sacred ode,[Pg 137] the metrical response of the oracle, the festal song, and the ballad immortalizing the deeds of heroes during the mythical ages. The art of poetry was coeval with the first settlement of the peninsula; but its higher development followed the transfusion of Hellenic genius into the older Pelasgian race.

The earliest forms of poetry were hymns to the deities. The religion of the Greeks was a worship of Nature. Imagination peopled every nook of their picturesque land with supernatural beings; and each was propitiated with song, from the wood-nymph supposed to reside in the spreading oak to the sun-god Apollo, who, with the Nine Muses, the goddesses of poetry, abode on snow-crowned Parnassus.

To Mother Earth (Deme’ter) were poured forth strains of glowing gratitude for her bounty; the Mother of the Gods (Cyb’ele) was worshipped with wilder verse, accompanied with the sound of cymbals and riotous dances; the god of wine (Diony’sus or Bacchus) was hymned with lively lays in praise of revelry; and so the burden of sacred song varied with the character of the divinity. When spring clothed the earth with beauty, the hymns were joyous; in autumn they breathed a spirit of sadness, and at the grape-harvest was sung a plaintive ditty, the Li’nus, as a coranach for the death of Nature. The perishing of vegetation before the blighting breath of approaching winter was symbolized by the fate of the beauteous youth Linus torn and devoured by furious dogs. Of similar allegorical significance were many of the hymns.

The delights and sorrows of domestic life also found utterance in verse; when the bride was escorted to her new home the nuptial song was sung, and for the dead the funeral dirge was chanted. At first this was no doubt done with solemn pomp, as a religious ceremony; but the tendency in Greece was to popularize song, and both dirge and bridal hymn in time lost their mere ritual complexion, and became changed in the mouths of the people into free outpourings of emotion.

[Pg 138]

The bard now aimed at entertaining his listeners; he filled an important place at banquets and festivals, where, in short poems, he chanted to the accompaniment of flute or lyre the adventures of heroes, or so transformed old traditions that he was looked upon as their maker (poie’tes, poet). All Greece honored him, regardless of his nationality. Whether Æolian, Dorian, or Ionian, he contributed equally to Hellenic fame, and was entitled to the sympathy and support of all Hellenes. Indeed, he was invested with a sacred character, for he was regarded as divinely inspired.

Thus was laid the foundation of Greek letters. From such rude beginnings, the Greek imagination, by strides unparalleled in history, mounted to the grandest heights ever attained in poetry. Moreover, to original Greek genius we owe the different varieties of literary composition,—epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry, history, criticism, and oratory. Without the Grecian models, nowhere has marked superiority been attained; the originals themselves have never been surpassed.

Tradition has given us the names of many poets belonging to the fabulous age. (On the gods and men of the Heroic Period, read Gladstone’s “Juventus Mundi.”)

LEGENDARY POETS OF GREECE.

• Orpheus, the Thracian minstrel, inventor of religious poetry.
• Tham’yris, deprived of his sight and poetical talent for challenging the Muses to a trial of skill on the lyre.
• Eumolpus, a Thracian priest; reputed founder of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
• O’len, earliest prophet of Apollo.
• Chrysoth’emis, the Cretan.
• Musæus (inspired by the Muses), a son or disciple of Orpheus.
• Amphi’on, taught of the god Mercury; raised stones into the walls of Thebes by the strains of his lyre.
• Philammon, son of Apollo, and inventor of choral music.
• Pamphos, author of the first Linus.
• Olympus, introducer of the flute.
• Phemon’oe, first priestess at the Delphic shrine, inventor of hexameters.

HOMER AND HIS WORKS.

Homer.—The oldest literary productions of Greece extant are the poems of Homer, the most ancient monuments of Aryan poetry west of the Persian Gulf. About 1000 B.C., among the legion of ballad-writers, the reciters of battle-songs, myths, and traditions (known as Rhapsodists—ode-stitchers), there arose an Ionian poet who soon towered head and shoulders above them all—a giant among the giants of literature—Homer, of unique genius and world-wide fame.

As to Homer’s life, we must ever remain in the dark. For the honor of giving him birth, seven cities of antiquity disputed,[21] Smyrna seeming to have the best claim. If we may believe tradition, he gave early evidence of his divine powers. Chance took him on a sea-voyage, during which he visited many countries, among them Ithaca, the home of Ulysses, one of his heroes. On the island of Chi’os, his favorite resort, he is thought to have written his epics the Il’iad and Od’yssey, the first in early manhood, the second in old age.

Legend relates that Homer, twice warned by an oracle to beware of the young men’s riddle, went ashore one day on I’os, an island of the Cyc’lades, and there, noticing some boys who had been fishing, asked them, “What luck?” “What we caught we left, what we could not catch we carried with us,”[Pg 140] was the reply. Unable to guess the riddle, the old poet died of vexation. According to another account, disease carried him off. He was buried on the sea-shore at Ios, where in after years this epitaph marked his tomb:—

Homer’s Style.—Homer’s Iliad was the first Greek poem in which were combined ingenuity of plot, unity of subject, and a faithful delineation of character throughout. He deals with heroes, but they are men of like passions with ourselves. The Odyssey, if less sublime, in its pathos and fine touches of nature shows the same rich gifts of genius as the older poem of loftier flight. Both works are written in hexameter verse, the true metre of the ancient epic.

The distinguishing features of Homer’s style are clearness, a vigor which makes us feel we are in the presence of a master, and a childlike simplicity that well accords with his sublime themes. His fidelity to nature is matched only by Shakespeare’s; and imagery, profuse as it is rich, life-like, and appropriate, lights up every page. Simile is Homer’s own figure; and transporting pictures flash ever and anon across the scene, called up by his magic wand. For example:—

Homer astonishes us with his universal knowledge. He names every part of a vessel technically with all the accuracy of a veteran seaman; he is as conversant with the details of a sacrifice as the officiating priest; he describes a conflict between two warriors with the precision of a master of fence; he sketches the forms and usages of palaces as if born and bred in kings’ courts, and is equally familiar with the manners of the meanest hind. Everywhere he is at home.

Other poets[22] may be stars in the firmament, but Homer, as Longi’nus says, is the sun in the zenith. His poetry is all nature, life, action, fire. It breathes an atmosphere of pure morality, and furnishes ideal characters long held up as models to the Grecian youth, who learned his verses by heart and in some cases could even repeat his entire poems. Human genius has left on earth at intervals of centuries a few imperishable monuments; none nobler among these than the marvellous Greek epics.

Plan of the Iliad.—The Iliad, a poem of twenty-four books, is a tale of the siege of Troy (Il’ium), a city on the coast of Asia Minor (probable date of the siege, 1194-1184 B.C.). The cause of the war was the perfidious conduct of Paris, son of Priam, the Trojan monarch. Hospitably entertained at the court of Menela’us, king of Sparta, he eloped with Helen, the wife of his host, the most beautiful of women, and carried her off to Asia with the treasures of her husband. To avenge this outrage, Menelaus, supported by Nestor the sage of Py’los, called upon the Greek princes, collected an armament of a thousand ships, the command of which was conferred upon[Pg 142] his brother Agamemnon, and set sail for Troy. A war of ten years followed, which ended in the capture of the city by stratagem, the slaughter of Priam and his family, and the enslavement of many of the Trojans.

The special subject of the Iliad is the wrath of the Thessalian Achilles (a-kil’leez), the leading warrior of the Grecian host, and the time of the action is near the close of the war. Agamemnon, compelled to restore to her father, a priest of Apollo, the captive maid Chryse’is who had fallen to his share, seizes upon Brise’is, a virgin allotted to Achilles. A quarrel results, and Achilles withdraws from the camp.

Emboldened by his absence, the Trojans redouble their efforts. Misfortunes to the Greek cause follow; and though many heroes second only to Achilles—the stalwart Ajax, the cunning Ulysses, king of Ithaca, Menelaus, and Diomede—exert themselves to turn the tide of battle, the Greek host is made keenly to feel the loss of its puissant champion. Jupiter, king of heaven, sides with the Trojans; and Hector “of the dancing helm-crest” drives the besiegers to their ships.

At length Achilles, still unwilling to join in the fray himself, allows Patro’clus, his bosom-friend, to lead his Myrmidons to the rescue. Arrayed in the armor of the Thessalian chief, Patroclus puts to flight the deceived Trojans; but, pursuing them too far, receives a death-wound from the hand of Hector. The news of his friend’s fall fills Achilles with thirst for revenge. A reconciliation is effected with Agamemnon; Achilles returns to the field; the enemy are thrown into confusion; and Hector, pierced by his spear, is dragged in triumph at Achilles’ chariot-wheels. The wrath of the Greek hero is finally appeased by the sacrifice of twelve Trojan captives at the funeral of Patroclus.

To redeem the body of his son, old Priam, alone and unarmed, enters the Grecian camp, is well received by Achilles, who melts into pity at the sight of the grief-stricken suppliant,[Pg 143] accomplishes his purpose, and returns to Troy with Hector’s corpse. This meeting between Achilles and Priam is counted among the finest scenes.—The Iliad closes with the obsequies of Hector. (See Gladstone’s “Homer and the Homeric Age.”)

Achilles, the central figure of the poem, over whose grave Alexander wept jealous tears, was the impersonation of youthful beauty and physical prowess. Brave, generous, passionate, devoted in his friendship but awful in his implacable anger, in him we are brought face to face with the ideal of Greek chivalry. Hector, the magnanimous Trojan hero, was the type of moral courage and domestic virtue. He appears as the affectionate husband, the loving father, kind even to fallen Helen. Homer has painted with exquisite touch a parting scene between Hector and his consort Androm’ache, possessed of every wifely virtue. This passage, herewith presented, is pronounced the most beautiful in the Iliad.

PARTING OF HECTOR AND ANDROMACHE.

The ancients implicitly believed the story of the Iliad, but modern scepticism has doubted its truth and questioned the authenticity of the poem itself. The German critic Wolf and others have even gone so far as to deny that any such person as Homer ever existed, contending that the name means simply a fitter together or compiler, and that the great epic is a mosaic of romantic legends by different rhapsodists, for years kept from perishing merely by oral repetition.

Such, however, is the continuity of the narrative, the identity of style, the consistency in carrying out the several characters, that this theory, ingeniously as it has been urged, lacks credibility. We see no reason to doubt that, despite a few minor discrepancies, one great intellect gave birth in the main to both these epics; that whatever foundations for them may have been laid in previous ballads, the glorious superstruct[Pg 147]ures were reared by one master-builder. It is easier to believe that there was one transcendent genius, than that there were half a dozen of uniform poetic power, competent to have had a hand in works so glorious—works displaying perfect unity of design, and taste so faultless that from them, as standards, have been deduced the very principles of criticism and laws of epic poetry.

Besides the internal evidence of its authenticity, the historical facts woven into the Iliad have received unexpected confirmation in the discoveries of Doctor Schliemann, a German explorer who claims to have unearthed the Ilium of Homer, and to have found among its ruins gold and amber ornaments once worn by King Priam.

Plan of the Odyssey.—In the Odyssey, divided like the Iliad into twenty-four books, Homer has immortalized the story of the return-voyage of Ulysses (Odysseus in Greek) from Troy to Ithaca. After a series of remarkable adventures and hair-breadth escapes, the hero is cast on the lovely island of the sea-nymph Calypso, who, becoming enamored of him, detains him for seven years. During this time, a number of insolent suitors force themselves upon Ulysses’ faithful wife Penelope, take up their residence at her court, and there lead a riotous life, hoping that the queen will bestow her hand on one of them and thus make him lord of Ithaca. They even plan the murder of her son Telem’achus.

Admonished by Jupiter, Calypso reluctantly allows Ulysses to depart, and he finally reaches Ithaca in safety. Disguised as a beggar, he enters his palace after an absence of twenty years, to endure the insults of the suitors, but to concert with his son for their overthrow.

On the following day, a great festival is held, and Penelope agrees to give her hand to him who shall send an arrow from Ulysses’ bow through a row of twelve rings. The suitors try in turn without success; but the beggar, obtaining possession[Pg 148] of the bow, draws the shaft to its head and accomplishes the feat. Then turning on the trembling suitors, he showers his arrows among them, and none escape. The true-hearted Penelope is restored to him whom she had wept as lost, and husband and wife sit down together to talk over the sorrows of the past.

Ulysses next discovers himself to his father; and they two, with their friends, succeed in putting down the adherents of the suitors and restoring peace to the kingdom.

Among the most beautiful passages of the Odyssey is that in which the poet introduces us to the happy household of Alcinoüs, king of an island on which Ulysses was thrown. Charming is the simple sketch he gives of the unaffected princess of this isle, just before her marriage, driving her maidens to the river in her father’s chariot, to wash the robes of state, lunch, and disport upon the bank while the clothes are drying. The royal mother superintends the weaving, the royal daughter the washing. We quote Homer’s description of the

PALACE AND GARDEN OF ALCINOÜS.

Minor Poems of Homer.—The Iliad and the Odyssey are the only authentic productions of Homer. To their author, however, have been attributed about thirty hymns and several minor poems, which have little claim to so distinguished an origin. Of these, “the Margites,” a satire on a blockhead who knew much “but everything knew ill,” was probably the work of some clever Athenian in an age when epic poetry was a thing of the past; the poem is no longer extant.

“The Battle of the Frogs and Mice,” a mock heroic of comparatively modern birth, is still preserved and appreciated. It is a witty burlesque on the Iliad (perhaps the earliest burlesque extant), written in a bold and flowing style. The plot is brief. A mouse, Crumb-snatcher, son of the Mice-king, flying from an enemy, reaches a pool over which a courteous frog, Puff-cheek, undertakes to carry him. But during the passage a water-snake appears; the frightened frog dives to escape his foe, and thoughtlessly leaves his newly-made friend to drown. The mice gather to avenge the loss of their prince; a great battle ensues, and but for the interference of Jupiter the frogs would have been annihilated.

The so-called Homeric Hymns, which the ancients believed to be the work of Homer, if somewhat inferior in age to the Iliad and Odyssey, are undoubtedly older than the pieces named above. Those addressed to Apollo, Mercury, Venus,[Pg 151] and Ceres, the finest in the collection, are regular poems of some length; the others are simple eulogies or brief preludes to longer pieces. The Hymn to Venus has a tenderness and warmth not unworthy of Homer. The one in honor of Ceres relates the abduction of her daughter Pros’erpine by Pluto, king of the lower world, the mother’s search for the stolen maiden, her anger on discovering the ravisher, and the final arrangement that the goddess shall enjoy the society of her daughter during two-thirds of the year. As a favorable specimen of its style, we cite the lines that follow:—

THE ABDUCTION OF PROSERPINE.

There are also various fragments styled Homeric, supposed to have been dropped from the poet’s genuine or spurious works. Among these is the beautiful couplet quoted by Plato:—

Cyclic Poets.—After the death of Homer, a host of imitators sprung up in Greece and Asia Minor. Rhapsodists by profession, as they wandered among the Grecian cities reciting the Homeric poems, their attention was naturally directed to epic composition, and they sought to supply in verse like Homer’s what the Iliad and Odyssey had left untold. Confining themselves to the Cycle (circle) of the Trojan War, they were called Cyc’lic poets.

One bard sung of the preparations made by the Grecian chiefs and the events of the war prior to Achilles’ withdrawal; two others took up the narrative where the Iliad left it, and described the sack of Troy; a fourth celebrated the return voyages of the Greek heroes; a fifth supplemented the Odyssey with the later history of Ulysses. Fragments only of these Cyclic epics survive.

HESIOD AND HIS WORKS.

Hesiod.—Homer was an Ionian of Asia Minor. Shortly after his time, or, as some think, contemporaneously with him, a new school of epic poetry appeared in the mother-country.[Pg 153] Its founder was Hesiod, who, like Homer, wrote in the Ionic dialect.

Hesiod was born at Ascra in Bœotia, and brought up in the midst of rural life at the base of Mount Helicon. Here first he held free converse with the Muses. On his father’s death, he was defrauded of his portion of the estate by his younger brother Perses, who bribed the judges charged with making the division. Hesiod felt the wrong keenly, yet seems to have regarded his unnatural brother with fraternal interest; for one object of his poem entitled “Works and Days,” was to reclaim Perses from dissolute improvidence and incite him to a life of industry.

The first portion of this work is devoted to moral lessons; some in a proverbial form, and others illustrated by narratives and fables. The latter part contains practical directions for the husbandman, and also treats of the art of navigation, important to the Bœotian farmer because much of his produce was shipped to other countries. The whole abounds in excellent precepts for every-day life, and forms the earliest specimen of didactic poetry among the Greeks. For ages its lines were committed to memory and recited as part of the course of ethics in their schools.

FROM HESIOD’S WORKS AND DAYS.

RIGHT AND WRONG.

SOME OF HESIOD’S PROVERBS.

Next in importance to the “Works and Days” is “the Theogony,” devoted to the genealogy and history of the Grecian gods, thirty thousand in number. Whatever interest this poem may have possessed for the believer in the Greek mythology, to the reader of the present day it is for the most part tedious, though relieved by occasional grand descriptions of battles between the celestial personages. “The Shield of Hercules” also bears the name of Hesiod; and of works ascribed to him, but not now extant, there are about a dozen.

Hesiod mentions a poetical contest between himself and another, which took place at the funeral of Amphid’amas, king of Eubœa, and in which he obtained a tripod as a prize. Tradition mentions Homer as his competitor on that occasion, and even gives the inscription placed on the tripod by the victor:—

But this part of the story rests on insufficient evidence.

Hesiod is said to have been slain, during a visit to the Locrian town of Œnoë, by two brothers, in revenge for an insult offered to their sister by Hesiod’s companion, which caused her to destroy herself. The poet’s body, thrown into the sea, was brought to shore by his dog, or as some say by dolphins. Thereupon the indignant people put the murderers to death and razed their dwellings to the ground—an incident which shows the sacredness attached to the vocation of the bard in those early times.

[Pg 156]

Though Hesiod ranks far below Homer, and indeed is often commonplace, yet at times his style exhibits enthusiasm and even rises to sublimity. We must respect him for the pure morality of his teachings.

POETS OF THE EPIC CYCLE.

• Arcti’nus of Mile’tus.
  His poem of 9,100 verses had Memnon, an Ethiopian chief, for its hero. It treated of the part taken in the Trojan War by the Amazons, who arrived after Hector’s funeral; the death of their queen, Penthesile’a, at the hand of Achilles; the fall of Achilles himself; and the sack of Troy.
• Les’ches of Mytile’ne.
  Author of the Little Iliad, a supplement to the greater work of that name; it took up the narrative where Homer leaves off, and carried it to the fall of Troy.
• Stasi’nus of Cyprus.
  Wrote the Cypria, in eleven books, narrating the events that preceded the Trojan War, and the incidents of the first nine years of the siege.
• A’gias the Trœzenian.
  His epic in five books, called Nostoi (the Returns), was descriptive of the home-voyages of the Greek heroes.
• Eu’gamon of Cyre’ne.
  The Telegonia, a continuation of the Odyssey to the death of Ulysses, who falls by the hand of Teleg’onus, his son by Cir’ce.

NOTES ON GREEK WRITING, ETC.

LYRIC POETRY.

Rise of Lyric Poetry.—For more than two hundred years after Homer and Hesiod, no one worthy of the name of poet appeared in Greece. Greek genius seemed to have exhausted itself. A few feeble imitators of the great master, and epic poetry was no more. The spirit of the Iliad and the Odyssey died with the monarchies whose chieftains they immortalized. When popular governments arose, the bard no longer celebrated the gods and demigods of the past, or traced the genealogies of kings, but sung the glories of his country, or poured forth without restraint the emotions of his soul. Thus lyric poetry was the child of liberty.

Varieties.—At the beginning of the seventh century B.C., there was a new birth of poesy; Grecian song burst forth once more, from hearts throbbing with enthusiasm at the triumph of free institutions. Solemn dirges and stately hymns chanted by olive-crowned youth bearing offerings to the gods, were no longer paramount; ballads full of human feeling, lyrics appealing directly to the people—to the patriot, the artisan, the shepherd, the lover, the pleasure-seeker—struck chords that vibrated in many hearts. Feasts afforded frequent occasions for outbursts of national feeling, it being the custom of the guests to pass a branch of myrtle from hand to hand, each as he received it repeating an appropriate verse.

A favorite banquet-song of the fifth century B.C. was the following eulogy of Harmo’dius and Aristogi’ton, the Athenian heroes who slew the tyrant Hipparchus:—

[Pg 158]

The flower-songs of the Greeks were especially beautiful; children enjoyed their nursery rhymes; while in the Lay of the Swallow, the penniless bard, chanting at the gate, sought an avenue to the charity of his rich neighbor.

FROM THE LAY OF THE SWALLOW.

The creations of the lyric muse are graceful, touching, and true to nature. We regret not to exchange the sublime heights of epic poetry for an humbler field in which we may commune with the joys and sorrows, the hopes and fears, of humanity. Here, as Tegner says, Greek poetry arises “slender, smooth,[Pg 159] erect like the palm-tree with its rich yet symmetrical crown; and a nightingale sits among the leaves and sings.”

THE ELEGY.

The Ionians, first to free themselves from kingly rule, gave to the Hellenic world the earliest forms of lyric poetry,—the elegiac couplet and the lighter iambic verse appropriate to satire. These twin-born metres, of Ionian parentage, grew up side by side in Greece. In the elegiac couplet, a dactylic line of five feet or their equivalent followed the sonorous hexameter,[26] constituting a livelier measure than the old heroic verse, which consisted of hexameters alone.

The Greek elegy was not necessarily plaintive; on the contrary, it did good service in rousing to action in time of war, and gave fitting expression to the spirit of the banquet-hall.

Callinus.—The inventor of this metre was Calli’nus of Eph’esus, in Ionia, who flourished between 730 and 678 B.C. He attempted by it to excite his countrymen against a horde of barbarian invaders; but the people were too much enervated by intercourse with the effeminate nations of Asia to respond to his thrilling strains.

The following is a fragment of Callinus, perhaps the oldest war-elegy in existence:—

Tyrtæus.—Another proficient in this variety of elegy was Tyrtæus, supposed to have been born in the Attic town of Aphidnæ. He led the Spartans in the Second Messenian War (685-668 B.C.), they having, by the direction of an oracle, sent to Athens for a general, to secure the success which had before been denied them. The story is that the jealous Athenians despatched to their neighbors a deformed schoolmaster, the cripple Tyrtæus, in the belief that his services would be of little value; but they mistook. The greatest military genius could not have accomplished more; for Tyrtæus, by his wise counsels and inspiriting war-songs, made his soldiers invincible. Messenia fell, and her citizens became slaves to the Spartans. Nor, afterward, was the poetry of Tyrtæus less efficacious in quelling civil dissensions and establishing domestic peace. In every respect, “the Muse of Sparta,” as he was called, proved to be to his adopted country the blessing promised by the oracle.

Tyrtæus is said to have invented the trumpet, and introduced it as a companion to the flute, then the chief instrument in use. Some have interpreted the lameness of the bard as signifying his limping measure, the second line of the elegiac couplet being, as we have seen, a foot shorter than the first.

Of the many productions of Tyrtæus, consisting of marching-songs, as well as warlike and political elegies, only a few[Pg 161] fragments survive. His poems, characterized by terseness and impassioned power, were long popular among the Spartans, who, on a campaign, were wont to recite them after each evening meal to kindle afresh their martial fire.

BATTLE-HYMN OF TYRTÆUS.

THE SATIRE.

Archilochus of Pa’ros (728-660 B.C.) was the first great satirist, the inventor of that rapid, loosely-constructed iambic measure so admirably adapted to his withering lampoons. The son of a slave-woman, Archil’ochus was treated with indignity in his native island; so bidding adieu to “the figs and fishy life” of Paros in early youth, he sailed with a colony to Tha’sos in the northern Ægean. His new home, however, disappointed his expectations; its gold-mines yielded not the fortune he had dreamed of, and he denounced it as “the sink[Pg 162] of all Hellenic ills.” The colonists becoming engaged in war with a neighboring people, a pitched battle proved too severe an ordeal for the poet’s courage, and dropping his shield he fled.

Perhaps it was for this cowardly action, perhaps on account of his empty purse, that when he returned to Paros, one of its fair daughters, who had been his boyhood’s love, refused him her hand. Her father, also, denied his suit; whereupon the furious poet poured forth in stinging verses such a torrent of violent invective upon the girl and her whole family, that she, her father, and her sisters, are said to have taken refuge from his scurrilous attacks in suicide.

The public odium thus excited drove Archilochus from Paros. But the brand of cowardice was upon him. The Spartans, whose mothers, pointing to the battle-field, were wont to say “Return with your shields or upon them,” disdained the man who could write,

Insult met him at every step, till a poetical victory at the Olympic Games restored him to popular favor. He went back to Paros, an old man, to redeem his reputation as a soldier by dying in battle with the Naxians. Then all Greece awoke to the greatness of his genius; and the prediction of an oracle before his birth, that he would be “immortal among men in the glory of his song,” was fulfilled.

Fertility of invention, and an intimate acquaintance with human nature, were conspicuous in the poetry of Archilochus. Elegies and love-songs flowed from his pen, and his philosophical poetry gained for him from Plato the epithet of “Wisest;” but it was in satire that classical writers conceded to him the highest rank. Archilochus likens himself to a hedgehog bris[Pg 163]tling with quills, whose “one great resource is worth all the devices of more powerful animals.” From his birthplace, ill-natured satire has been called Parian verse.

So little remains of the writings of this author that we can hardly decide whether his countrymen judged aright in reckoning him second only to Homer. The two represented distinct departments of poetry; each in his own, it was claimed, fell little short of perfection. Where Homer praised, Archilochus reviled. Their birthdays were celebrated in one grand festival, and a single double-faced statue perpetuated the memory of the Epic Poet and the Parian Satirist.

ARCHILOCHUS TO HIS SOUL.

Greek satire had other representatives, whose names will be found at the end of this chapter; but their genius was of a lower grade.

ÆOLIC AND DORIC SCHOOLS.

Lyric poetry was the peculiar province of the Æolian and Dorian Greeks, who carried it to perfection. The Æolic writers were replete with intense passion, and employed lively metres of simple structure. The Dorian lyric, intended to be sung by choruses or to choral dances on great occasions, funerals, marriages, or public festivals, was a much more majestic, but at the same time a more intricate and artificial composition. The most distinguished composers of the Æolic School were Alcæus and Sappho; of the Doric, Simonides and Pindar.

[Pg 164]

Alcæus flourished in the latter part of the seventh century B.C. He was a noble of Lesbos, and lived in the stirring times when the constitutional and the aristocratic party contended for the sovereignty. In this struggle Alcæus appears as the deadly foe of democratic rule; when his friend Pittacus was clothed with supreme authority by the people, Alcæus directed against him the keenest shafts of his satire. Pittacus defeated him in an attempt to overthrow the government, but generously spared his life, saying, “Forgiveness is better than revenge.” Of the poet’s subsequent career we are ignorant.

The ancients were loud in their praises of Alcæus. His poems were polished, full of vehemence and passion, sublime in their denunciations of tyranny and encomiums of freedom. Love and wine were two of his favorite topics; yet even his jovial pieces were pervaded by a loftiness of sentiment foreign to mere sensual songs. Among his most beautiful compositions were the odes to Sappho, whose love he once sought, but whose genius soared to greater heights than his. We take from Alcæus

THE CONSTITUTION OF A STATE.

The Lesbian Poetesses.—Lesbos was the centre of lyric song. To its shores, the waves of ocean are fabled to have borne the lyre of Orpheus, which the people hung in Apollo’s[Pg 165] temple: thus traditionally distinguished by fate, it became renowned as the home of Grecian poetesses.

The Lesbian women were not confined to domestic duties, but were allowed to take part in public affairs. They founded societies for the cultivation of their literary tastes, and before all Greece vindicated the genius of their sex. And Lesbos was the very clime for poetry to ripen in. The love of the beautiful was fed on every side. The island was a paradise of groves and rivulets, of blossoms and perfumes. Among its olive-clad hills, at its fountains set in violets and fringed with fern, under its stately pines, and in its temples shining with ivory and gold, its poetesses received their inspiration.

Sappho.—Greatest of these, and queen of her sex in intellectual endowments, was Sappho, “the Lesbian Nightingale,” “spotless, sweetly-smiling, violet-wreathed,” as Alcæus fondly described her, whom all Greece knew as The Poetess.

In her history it is difficult to separate the true from the fabulous. Born at Mytile’ne, the capital of the island, in the latter part of the seventh century B.C., she was deprived of a mother’s care at the age of six. In early womanhood, a new calamity befell her in the loss of her husband, and thenceforth she devoted her genius to letters, making the elevation of her countrywomen the great object of her life. Her reputation soon spread throughout Greece. Mytilene became the seat of a brilliant sisterhood eager in the study of the polished arts; sparkling conversation enlivened its meetings; music and poetry were the branches its members specially cultivated; love was the common subject of their verse; their lives were above reproach. In the centre of this constellation of gifted women blazed Sappho, “Star of Lesbian Song.” Greece, captivated by her sweet numbers, accorded her a place by Homer’s side—then raised her to the level of its goddesses as “the Tenth Muse.”

[Pg 166]

The Lover’s Leap.

Ancient story made Sappho the victim of disappointed love. Overcome with passion for Pha’on, a beautiful Mytilenean youth notorious for his heart-breaking propensities, and finding Phaon indifferent to her advances, she is said to have thrown herself from the Leuca’dian promontory[27] and drowned her passion in the Ionian Sea. There is, however, no evidence[Pg 167] to support the story; on the contrary, the poetess seems to have been implicated with Alcæus in a conspiracy against Pittacus, who then ruled in Lesbos, and to have been banished in consequence. (On the Æolic school of Sappho, consult Donaldson’s “History of the Literature of Ancient Greece,” p. 218.)

Sappho’s Style.—Simplicity, tenderness, concentrated passion, and brilliancy of description, are characteristic of Sappho’s verse. Her poetry is the very language of harmony; no more musical measures than hers were known to the Greeks. Her favorite stanza, an invention of her own, consisted of four lines with a cadence like the following:—

In depicting love, Sappho is unmatched. Her utterances, indeed, were so intense as to be misconstrued by the sensual Greeks of a later day, and give rise to reports injurious to her good name; or possibly she may have been confounded with another Sappho, of a different character; but we have no doubt that her life was as pure as her poetry is charming. Her imagery, when imagery she used, Sappho gathered from the[Pg 168] bright-tinted flowers, the starry skies, and fragrant zephyrs of Lesbos, where, as she sung,

Judging from her fragments, we must admit that in her peculiar department Sappho stands without a peer. Indeed, her own graceful lines may well be applied to herself:—

for the lesser lights of lyric poesy pale in the lustre of her genius.

Addison, in his Spectator, makes the following remarks on Sappho, which are fully justified by the praises of ancient critics:—“Among the mutilated poets of antiquity, there are none whose fragments are so beautiful as those of Sappho. One may see, by what is left, that she followed nature in all her thoughts, without descending to those little points, conceits, and turns of wit, with which many of our modern lyrics are so miserably infected. Her soul seems to have been made up of love and poetry. She felt the passion in all its warmth and described it in all its symptoms. I do not know, by the character that is given of her works, whether it is not for the benefit of mankind that they are lost. They were filled with such bewitching tenderness and rapture, that it might have been dangerous to have given them a reading.”

It is told that a physician, by studying the symptoms of love as described by Sappho, detected in the mysterious sickness of the young Anti’ochus, son of the king of Syria, a hidden passion for his step-mother. The treatment was in accord[Pg 169]ance with the diagnosis, the disease disappearing when the anxious father relinquished to the youth the beautiful object of his affections.

Sappho’s description of the raptures of love, commended by all critics from Longinus down, is certainly a nonpareil. It has been thus translated by Ambrose Philips, a friend of Addison’s:—

A LOVE SONG.

The grave Solon paid our authoress a delicate compliment. Having heard his nephew recite one of her poems, he is said to have exclaimed that he would not willingly die till he had learned it by heart.

The works of Sappho, comprised in nine books, embraced love-lays, elegies, bridal songs sometimes extended into miniature dramas, and amorous hymns to Venus and Cupid. The remnants are principally erotic pieces. We present below the Hymn to Venus, preserved entire, in which the writer delicately makes the goddess her confidante, and modestly discloses the secret of her misplaced affections.

[Pg 170]

HYMN TO VENUS.

THE ROSE.

Sappho’s Pupils.—Doubtless many went forth from Sappho’s school to reflect, in their own accomplishments, the brilliancy of their mistress. History has preserved the names of two of her pupils—Damoph’yla of Asia Minor, noted for a Hymn to Diana; and Erinna, a Rhodian maid who shone among the brightest lights of Sappho’s circle, and, if we may believe the story, died of a broken heart when compelled by her parents to exchange the delights of literature for the drudgery of the spinning-wheel. This cruel treatment Erinna made the subject of an affecting lament, “the Spindle,” a poem of three hundred hexameters, on which her reputation rests. Her death at the age of nineteen cheated the world of a writer who promised to rival Homer himself.

“The Spindle” is lost; but the following epigram on a virgin of Lesbos, who died on the day appointed for her marriage, speaks for Erinna:—

A pointed epitaph in the Greek Anthology shows the estimation in which the poetess was held by her countrymen:—

Anacreon.—In the sixth century, Te’os, a seaport of Ionia, gave birth to the society poet, Anacreon; who, though an Ionian, wrote rather in the style of the Æolian lyrics. His verses, however, while soft and graceful, were marked by levity, and lacked the dignity and depth of the Æolic school. “The Muse, good humor, love, and wine,” Anacreon tells us, were his themes; accordingly his songs, brimming with sensuality, grew in popular estimation as Greece degenerated in public morality.

When his native city fell a prey to Cyrus the Persian, Anacreon with the other inhabitants set sail for Thrace (540 B.C.). From Thrace, while yet in his youth, he withdrew to the island of Sa’mos whose tyrant, Polyc’rates, was a munificent patron of literature and art. Amid the gayety of the Samian court, the witty and pleasure-loving poet found a congenial home, Polycrates making him an intimate companion and confiding to him important state secrets. But the ruler of Samos was treacherously put to death by a Persian satrap; about which time, Anacreon was invited to Athens by the tyrant Hipparchus, who sent his royal trireme to bring his poet-laureate across the Ægean.

At Athens, Anacreon for a time gave free rein to his passions, joining a set of boon companions who basked in the[Pg 173] 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:—

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.

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 offered, 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[Pg 175] 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 Thermopylæ 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, pæans, 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[Pg 176] 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.

DANAË’S LAMENT.

EPITAPH ON THE NIECE OF HIPPARCHUS.

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.

[Pg 177]

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 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.”

[Pg 178]

MINOR POETS OF THE CHORAL SCHOOL.

• Alcman (671-631 B.C.), Sparta’s jovial lyric poet, an emancipated Lydian slave.
• Stesich’orus of Sicily (632-560 B.C.), inventor of the choric system; named from his occupation Stesichorus, leader of the chorus. His greatness foreshadowed by a nightingale that alighted on his infant lips and burst into song: hymns, fables, pastorals: the earliest Greek novelist; his love tales and romances narrated in verse.
• Terpander the Lesbian (about 650 B.C.), the founder of Greek musical science, and inventor of the heptachord, or seven-stringed lyre.
• Ib’ycus, of Rhegium in southern Italy (540 B.C.), lived in Samos as the friend of Polycrates, His odes principally erotic: from the warmth of his passion, Ibycus was styled “the love-maddened.”
• Bacchyl’ides (470 B.C.), the nephew of Simonides of Ceos: hymns, epigrams, etc., in Doric: style highly polished: a specimen epigram is,
  
  “The touchstone tries the purity of gold,

  And by all-conquering truth man’s worth and wit are told.”
• Timoc’reon of Rhodes (471 B.C.), lyric poet and satirist.

Earliest Prose Writings.—For several centuries, the literature of Greece was confined to poetry. In Hellas, as elsewhere, verse for a time at first so charmingly and completely filled the popular ear that there was no desire, no room, for prose. But, as new necessities arose, poetry could not suffice for Greece; not with epic and lyric voice alone were her men of genius to gain a hearing from the world. National achievements must be recorded; the people must be appealed to in the agora; the curtain of metaphysics must be raised; and so History, Oratory, and Philosophy appeared upon the stage. To these practical new-comers, the plain garb of prose was found more appropriate than the broidery of verse.

[Pg 179]

Moreover, the introduction of facilities for writing favored the development of prose literature; for, unlike poetry, it needed a written form to give it permanence. When the art of writing became familiar, and men with its help could rapidly inscribe their thoughts for others still more rapidly to read, prose, as a distinct branch of composition, was born; and its birth marked an era in the intellectual growth of the Greeks.

Ever since the introduction of letters, prose had doubtless been used more or less in despatches, records, laws, and official documents. Pherecy’des of Sy’ros and Cadmus of Miletus (about 550 B.C.) were the first to secure its recognition as a department of polite literature, the one embodying in it his philosophical doctrines, the other the fabulous history of his native land—with homely strength, if not with artistic finish.

Era of the Sages.—In the period during which prose gained its first foothold flourished the Seven Sages of Greece (665-540 B.C.). Revolutions were then the order of the day, the people were beginning actively to assert their rights, and political questions of vital interest absorbed the attention of thinkers. The flights of fancy became fewer, as these grave problems presented themselves. Philosophers strove to solve them at home; patriots went abroad to study foreign institutions; and all awoke to the discovery that “knowledge is power.”

The Seven Sages were gnomic poets, as well as philosophers and statesmen. Their moral and political maxims they usually threw into verse; but those inscribed on plates of metal and deposited in the temple of Apollo at Delphi, were in prose. In their proverbs, whether prose or poetry, we discern the dawn of moral philosophy.

Solon.—The greatest of the Seven Sages were Solon and Thales. Solon of Athens was born about 638 B.C. After extensive travels and studies, he drew up for the Athenians (594 B.C.) the famous code called by his name, which re[Pg 180]formed many abuses and secured to the people a liberal government. His laws were written in prose on the polished faces of triangular wooden prisms. These were set in frames, and turned on pivots by persons who wished to consult them. The state copy was carved on four-sided blocks of brass, and kept in the Acropolis.

Solon’s Tablets.

After Solon’s code was adopted, that it might be the better enforced, its author is said to have absented himself from Athens for ten years, visiting among other courts that of Crœsus, King of Lydia. To this visit, Crœsus owed his life; for afterward, when chained to the stake by Cyrus the Persian, the truth of one of Solon’s remarks,—that no man can be accounted happy while he still lives,—flashed upon his mind, and he thrice called upon the name of the Athenian sage. Cyrus demanded an explanation of his words, and, struck with the truth of Solon’s saying, revoked the order of execution and made Crœsus his friend.

Thales, of Miletus in Ionia (640-550 B.C.), was the founder of Greek philosophy. Water, according to his theory, was the source of all things; without this element, he truly said, his own body would fall into dust. This doctrine he is supposed to have derived from the Egyptians, who worshipped the Nile as a god, being dependent on its annual inundations for their crops.

In mathematical science and astronomy, Thales was an adept. His knowledge of the latter enabled him to predict a solar eclipse, which took place 610 B.C., and to divide the year into three hundred and sixty-five days. If he was an author, not a line of what he wrote has survived.

Fable.—An outgrowth of these practical times was the[Pg 181] Fable, or Allegory, in which the lower animals were introduced as speakers, with the object of satirizing the follies of mankind, or of conveying some useful moral more pointedly than by means of dry argument.

Destitute of the outward form of poetry, while in a measure retaining its imagery, fable may be regarded as a stepping-stone from the early lyrics to the stately prose of a later period. It at once became popular, as did also a kindred class of humorous tales, the characters of which were inanimate objects endowed with the power of speech. An earthen pot, for example, is represented as clamoring loudly against the woman who broke it; and she, as bidding it “cease its plaints and show its wisdom by buying a copper ring to bind itself together.”

Æsop.—The great fabulist of Greece, and indeed of all time, was Æsop. Born a Phrygian slave about 620 B.C., he passed from one master to another till at last his wit gained him freedom. Thus left to choose his own course, he became a student in foreign lands. Athens was his home for a number of years; and there, in his well-known fable of “the Frogs asking Jupiter for a King,” he read a lesson both to Pisistratus the Tyrant and to the people who imagined themselves oppressed under his government.

By special invitation, Æsop spent some time at the court of Crœsus. Here he made the acquaintance of Solon, who had incurred that monarch’s displeasure by speaking lightly of his vaunted wealth; and he is said to have admonished the Athenian sage that a wise man should resolve either not to converse with kings at all, or to converse with them agreeably.”—“Nay,” replied Solon, “he should either not converse with them at all, or converse with them usefully.”

Crœsus commissioned Æsop to go to Delphi for the purpose of sacrificing to Apollo and distributing a sum of money among the citizens. But Æsop quarrelled with the Del[Pg 182]phians, and taking it upon himself to withhold from them the Lydian gold, was seized by the enraged people and hurled from a precipice. Legend says that the murderers brought upon themselves the vengeance of heaven in the form of mysterious plagues.

While these particulars of Æsop’s life rest on rather dubious authority, it is certain that as a fable-writer he was deservedly appreciated in ancient Greece. At Athens, Æsop’s Fables became indispensable to a polite education. Their author does not appear to have committed them to writing; they passed from mouth to mouth for generations, undergoing more or less change. Hence we have left only the substance of those pointed stories over which the Athenians went into transports, and which Socrates amused himself by turning into verse during his imprisonment. The young folks of every age, with whom Æsop has always been a favorite, would applaud the Athenians for placing the statue of the world’s great fabulist before those of their Seven Sages.

When the people of Samos were on the point of executing a public officer who had robbed the treasury, they were induced to spare the offender by Æsop’s spicy fable of

THE FOX AND THE HEDGEHOG.

Progress of Greek Prose.—An impetus was given to the development of Greek prose by the praiseworthy efforts of[Pg 183] Pisistratus (537-527 B.C.), who gathered the first library in Greece, collected and edited the poems of Homer, and imitated his kinsman Solon in laboring to elevate the literary taste of the people. During his administration and that of his sons Hippias and Hipparchus, also patrons of letters, prose literature took deep root throughout the Ionian colonies, where history and philosophy had many representatives.

The style of these early writers was for the most part fragmentary, dry, and inelegant. It soon improved, however, grew into favor, and in the hands of the profound thinkers, fluent historians, and persuasive orators of Greece, was wrought into models which are still the admiration of the world.

EARLY PROSE WRITERS.

PHILOSOPHERS.

• Anaximander (born 610 B.C.),
  first map-drawer, and introducer of the sundial. He represented the earth as cylindrical, and as the centre about which the stars and planets revolved; its inhabitants as the result of fermentation caused by the action of the sun’s rays on its marshes. His “Treatise on Nature” (547 B.C.), the first work on biology and the earliest philosophical essay written in Greek.
• Anaxim’enes (born 556 B.C.)
  made the earth a leaf-shaped mass floating in the air; the sun and moon flat circular bodies; air the elementary principle from which all things were made and to which they returned: the soul, air.
• Heracli’tus of Ephesus (505 B.C.)
  rejected the nature-worship of his countrymen, and believed in an all-wise, omnipresent Power. He is recorded to have wept continually over the sins of men; hence called the weeping philosopher. Fire the first principle. “No man,” said he in allusion to the never-ceasing changes in the world, “can wade twice in the same stream.”

HISTORIANS.

• Cadmus of Miletus (540 B.C.):
  “Primeval History of Miletus and Ionia.”
• Acusila’us the Argive (525 B.C.):
  “Genealogies,” a prose translation of Hesiod’s “Theogony,” altered in parts to suit the theories of the author.
• Hecatæus the Milesian (520-479 B.C.),
  “the far-travelled man:” “Genealogies,” a history of the[Pg 184] mythical heroes of Greece; and a “Description of the Earth,” containing a summary of his own travels and explorations.
• Charon of Lampsacus (500-450 B.C.),
  the first historian to record authentic events: “History of the Persian War,” “Annals of Lampsacus,” “Chronicles of the Spartan Kings.”
• Hellani’cus of Mytilene, a noted compiler.
• Xanthus the Lydian: “The Lydiaca,” a history of Lydia in four volumes.

SEVEN SAGES AND THEIR MOTTOES.

• Solon of Athens: “Know thyself.”
• Chi’lo of Sparta: “Consider the end.”
• Thales of Miletus: “Who hateth suretyship is sure.”
• Bias of Priene: “Most men are bad.”
• Cleobu’lus of Lindus: “Avoid extremes.”
• Pit’tacus of Mytilene: “Seize time by the forelock.”
• Periander of Corinth: “Nothing is impossible to industry.”

(480-330 B.C.)

The Attic Period.—In their wars with the Persians (492-479 B.C.), the Hellenic people fully demonstrated their military superiority, vindicating their manhood on the fields of Marathon and Platæa, and in the sea-fight with Xerxes at Salamis. Under the stimulus of these national triumphs, conducing to national unity, as well as of the free institutions now generally established, the Greek mind was awakened to renewed action; literature made unprecedented growth, and in the fifth century B.C. matured its choicest products.

Athens, the laurel-crowned saviour of Greece, hitherto but an indifferent contributor to art and poetry, now became the centre of letters, aspiring through her statesman Pericles (469-429 B.C.) to both literary and political supremacy. Her At[Pg 185]tic dialect, nervous but not rough, harmonious without a too effeminate softness—the perfection of the Greek language—materially helped to make her the “mother of eloquence,” the home of poets and philosophers, the school of the nations; while Pericles extended her imperial dominion over many cities and islands, and filled her coffers with their tribute. Her sculptor Phidias devoted his genius to the erection and decoration of public edifices; his grand creations in marble adorned her fanes; and the Parthenon, whose classic beauty has passed into a proverb, owed to him its graceful embellishments as well as its renowned statue of Minerva. Another colossal image of the goddess surmounted the Athenian Acropolis, which was crowned with noble temples; and votaries of the sister art added to the attractions of the city with their brush and colors.

It was at this noonday of Attic glory that Grecian literature reached its meridian. Then lyric verse climbed to heights before unattained; and dramatic poetry, tragic and comic, held its listeners spell-bound. History found distinguished representatives in Herodotus the Ionian, and later in Thucydides and Xenophon, the Athenians. Philosophy, in no other age or clime, has had worthier teachers than Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle; while the art of persuasion seemed to be impersonated in Pericles, Isoc’rates, Æschines (es’ke-neez), Demosthenes—all true sons of Attica.

LYRIC POETRY.

Pindar.—Lyric poetry culminated in the sublime odes of Pindar, who ushered in the golden age. Pindar was born of noble parents about 520 B.C., near Thebes, a city of Bœotia. The celestials are fabled to have danced at his birth, and the dropping of honey on his infant lips by a swarm of bees was interpreted as an omen of a brilliant literary career.

An early display of poetical talent led his father to yield to[Pg 186] the boy’s desire and send him to Athens for instruction; thence he returned to Thebes, to study under the direction of the Bœotian poetesses, Myrtis and Corinna, who gave the finishing touches to his education. At the age of twenty, he composed an ode which established his reputation throughout Greece, and brought him into great request with princes and heroes who craved immortality for victories at the national games. Corinna was the rival of his youth; though she reproached Myrtis for entering the lists against Pindar, she was herself tempted to contend with her former pupil, and five times bore away from him the fillet of victory.

Pindar made choral poetry his profession, and was handsomely paid out of the treasuries of the Greek princes and free cities for laudatory odes written to their order. But he never descended to flattery or falsehood; on the contrary, he leavened his panegyrics with salutary advice, and fearlessly denounced pride, cupidity, and tyranny, even in monarchs. To the king of Cyrene, for example, whose tyranny afterward cost him his throne, he said: “It is easy for a fool to shake the stability of a city, but it is hard to place it again on its foundations.”

Pindar’s home was at Thebes, near Dirce’s fountain;[28] but he travelled much in Greece. For a time he was the honored guest of the Athenians; and no wonder, for when his native city sided with Persia in the deadly struggle with that empire, the poet condemned so pusillanimous a course and upheld Athens in her resistance, styling her “the Pillar of Greece.” It is told that he received from the Athenians a gift of 10,000 drachmas ($1,800), and that when the Thebans mulcted him for the bold expression of his views, the former generously paid the fine. At Delphi, which Pindar often visited, the people contributed their finest fruits for his entertainment by[Pg 187] order of the priestess; and an iron chair was set apart for his use in the temple, where he was wont to sit and sing the praises of Apollo, god of poetry. He lived four years with Hiero, and doubtless sojourned with others of his patrons. But Pindar was no boon companion of kings like Simonides, and while he accepted their costly presents he never forfeited the respect of his countrymen.

Pindar died at the age of eighty, in the theatre, it is related, amid the acclamations of the audience. He had been taking part as usual, and overcome with weariness, rested his head on the knees of a favorite pupil, and fell into a slumber from which his friends vainly strove to wake him. A tradition, more in accordance with the Greek love of the marvellous, informs us that a few days before he died Proserpine (goddess of the lower world) appeared to him, and having reproached him for slighting her in his odes, announced that he should soon compose a song in her honor within the confines of her own kingdom. Shortly after, Pindar’s death occurred; and on the following day, Thebes resounded with a hymn to Proserpine sung by an old woman, who declared the poet’s ghost had dictated it to her in a dream.

Statues were erected to Pindar at Athens and in the hippodrome of Thebes; a hundred years after, when Alexander the Great destroyed the latter city in consequence of its rebellion, he bade his soldiers spare the house hallowed by having once been the residence of the Theban bard. Statues and dwelling have since passed away, and the only surviving monument of Pindar is that reared by himself in the deathless odes he has left us.

The Pindaric Ode.—Pindar’s fertile pen enriched every department of lyric poetry; but all his compositions are lost except a few fragments of pæans and dirges, with forty-five Triumphal Odes (which we have entire) written to commemorate victories at the Great Games of Greece.

[Pg 188]

These games were celebrated at Olympia, Delphi, Neme’a, and on the Corinthian Isthmus: they consisted of athletic sports, races, literary and musical contests. All Greece was represented at them. Peasant and prince, trader and priest, poet and historian, painter and sculptor, hurried to the exciting scene as contestants or spectators; and the simple crown of olive or laurel, pine or parsley, that was placed on the conqueror’s brow, was valued beyond price. All that was needed to complete the triumph was an ode in its honor from the Great Lyrist. This, when obtained, was sung at an honorary banquet or solemn procession, amid great rejoicings; and was annually rehearsed in the victor’s native town to the accompaniment of soul-stirring music—for his family, town, and state, participated in the victor’s glory.

Pindar’s Style is original, chaste, full of splendor and majestic energy. The Theban eagle, as he has often been called, soaring to the sun, seems to disdain the commonplace in his solitary flight. His style, however, is not faultless. The over-boldness of his metaphors confuses; his massing of magnificent images and high-sounding epithets wearies; his Doric condensation obscures his meaning; his metre is too complicated for the uneducated ear, and his transitions are so abrupt that the reader has difficulty in finding the connection. His subjects were hard to treat; but Pindar found material and lent variety to his odes by skilfully interweaving legendary lore, history, and fragments of mythology. This was by Corinna’s advice; but her young pupil carried it to such excess in his first attempt that his fair teacher warned him, “One should sow with the hand, not with the whole sack.”

Pindar’s tone is everywhere moral. He merits indeed the title of “Sacerdotal Poet;” for he upheld the religion of Greece in its purity, rejecting all sensual notions of “the blessed ones,” and asserting his faith in their holiness and justice. He taught the immortality of the soul; “things of[Pg 189] a day” are men, but after death there is in store “a gladsome life.” His belief in an existence beyond the grave is indicated in the following lines from one of his dirges. And here be it observed that no translation can do justice to Pindar; the Doric diamonds cease to flash when removed from their Doric setting.

The more characteristic extract given below consists of portions of the Seventh Olympic Ode, in which the poet sings the praises of Diag’oras of Rhodes for having gained a victory with the cestus (made of leather thongs and worn round the hands in boxing). This ode was so much admired by the Rhodians that they wrote it in golden letters on the wall of Minerva’s temple at Lindus. It relates the birth of their patron goddess and the story of their own origin, closing with an invocation to Jupiter, who was worshipped on Ataby’ris, a mountain of the island. Here stood a temple, dedicated to him, containing the fabulous brazen bulls that bellowed when any calamity threatened.

[Pg 190]

ODE TO DIAGORAS.

[Pg 192]

Antimachus.—An elegiac poet of the golden age was Amtim’achus of Col’ophon, whose “Ly’de,” an elegy on his lost love, enjoyed considerable celebrity. When, however, Antim’achus undertook to read his long “Theba’is” to an audience, their patience became exhausted and one after another departed, until finally he had but a single listener left,—the young Plato.

DRAMATIC POETRY.

Rise of the Attic Drama.—The Greek drama, like the Hindoo, had a religious origin. In the festivals of Bacchus, the wine-god, which consisted of licentious dances and songs round his altar by persons disguised in goat-skins as fauns and satyrs (beings half-man and half-goat), we must look for its earliest phase. From the dress of those who composed the chorus, or because a goat was sacrificed, or a goat-skin of wine awarded to the poet who wrote the best ode for the occasion, such ode was called a tragedy (goat-song); and the name was afterward extended to the entire department of dramatic poetry to which these rude hymns gave rise.

Comedy, on the contrary, was elaborated from the village-songs rife during the gala-days of the vintage, when companies of noisy revellers (in Greek, kōmoi), their cheeks stained with wine-lees, went about from town to town, plunging into all kinds of excesses, and garnishing their songs with jokes at the expense of the spectators.

The Father of Greek tragedy was Thespis, the Icarian,[29] who refined the coarse Bacchanalian orgies, and introduced a single actor (generally sustaining the part himself), to alternate with the chorus or enter into a dialogue with its leaders (536 B.C.). Between the hymns, the poet, having smeared his face with paint, would mount a table and recite with copious[Pg 193] gestures some mythological legend, perhaps relating to Bacchus.

With a trained chorus, Thespis strolled about Greece, stopping at the towns to give his exhibitions on the wagon which carried his machinery and skin-clad troupe. Dancing was a prominent feature of his entertainments. His pupil Phryn’icus improved the performance by exchanging myths for real events and introducing female characters; but the recitations were still disconnected and the plays lacked method; albeit Phryn’icus was fined by the Athenians for moving their feelings too deeply by one of his pieces.

Birth of Tragedy.—Out of these rude materials, Æschylus, who was born about ten years after the first Thespian exhibition, constructed genuine tragedy. He added a second actor and remodelled the chorus, making it secondary to the dialogue, and instituting a connection between its songs and the events represented on the stage. Appropriate theatrical costumes, stationary scenery, painted masks, and thick-soled buskins to increase the height of the performers, complete the list of his innovations. Thus the goat-song of early days developed into the true drama (action), the crowning effort of Greek genius. Athens had the honor of creating and perfecting it; while in other departments of verse she fell behind her neighbors, in dramatic poetry she eclipsed them all.

The love of the theatre grew into a passion at Athens. When the first rude structure of boards gave way under the weight of the audience, her citizens erected a permanent edifice of semicircular form, whose seats, rising in tiers, were hewn in the rocky side of the Acropolis. This new theatre accommodated thirty thousand persons, who sat under the shadow of Athens’ patron-goddess, and with reverent gaze watched actors and chorus go through their parts round the altar of Bacchus.

The performances took place by day, and in the open air,[Pg 194] the theatre not being roofed. They began immediately after the morning meal, and on great occasions seats were secured and occupied during the preceding night. It was the custom of those who desired a comfortable sitting to bring their own cushions. Tickets of admission at first cost one drachma (18 cents); but Pericles reduced the price to six cents, and thus placed dramatic entertainments within the reach of the poorest citizens. The audience sometimes remained in the theatre twelve hours, gossiping during the intervals, and refreshing themselves with cake, wine, and sweetmeats.—In ancient Greece, the actor’s profession was lucrative and honorable; dramatic authors not unfrequently performed parts in their own plays. (Read Donaldson’s “Theatre of the Greeks.”)

Under the favoring skies of Athens the drama advanced to perfection with marvellous rapidity. In the hands of Æschylus it was all grandeur; Sophocles invested it with beauty, and Euripides with pathos. These three tragic poets, almost contemporaries, were the brightest ornaments of the Attic capital, where there were many bright. Their triumphs cover a period of seventy-eight years (484-406 B.C.), including the proud age of Pericles, but extending beyond it till the Peloponnesian War had deprived Athens of her supremacy. Simultaneously with Sophocles and Euripides flourished Aristophanes, under whom comedy reached its climax.

It has been computed that during the golden age 250 dramatic poets flourished, who produced more than 3,400 plays. Out of this vast number, only 44 have survived to our time.

Æschylus (525-456 B.C.).—Eleusis, a hamlet of Attica, was the birthplace of Æschylus. It is related that in his youth he was charged with watching grapes, and overcome by slumber, saw Bacchus in his dreams, who bade him devote himself to tragedy. The boy forgot not the injunction; he applied himself diligently to study, and in his twenty-fifth year contended, though unsuccessfully, for the chaplet of ivy.

[Pg 195]

Ten years afterward, he acquitted himself so bravely in the battle of Marathon as to receive a special prize, and have his deeds immortalized in a painting which was hung in the theatre at Athens. He also won distinction at Salamis and Platæa; and the name of one of his brothers was long remembered in connection with the sinking of the Persian admiral’s galley. During the flourishing period of Athenian history that followed, the literary reputation of Æschylus became as great as his military renown. He was the hero of thirteen poetical victories.

In 468 B.C. Æschylus left Athens for the court of Hiero, the Syracusan prince, round which so many great men clustered. According to some, the unjust award of the tragic prize to Sophocles, for political reasons, was the cause of his going. The more probable account is that his exile followed a public accusation of impiety, for disclosing certain religious mysteries in one of his plays. The popular excitement ran high; the poet was attacked with stones, when his brother happily averted the fury of the mob by uncovering before them the stump of his own arm, which had been mutilated at Salamis in defence of his country.

Hiero received our author hospitably; and the poet made return by writing for him a drama called “the Women of Etna.” Æschylus may have visited Athens after this; but if so, he returned to Sicily to die, in the sixty-ninth year of his age. While he sat in a field near Gela absorbed in thought, so the fable goes, an eagle, hovering over the spot with a tortoise in its talons, let the tortoise fall on his bald crown, which it mistook for a shining cobble-stone, for the purpose of breaking the shell. The bird’s aim was true; and the blow fractured the poet’s skull. Thus, in fulfilment of an oracular prediction, Æschylus received his death-stroke from heaven.

In sublimity and power of dealing with the terrible, Æschylus[Pg 196] is unequalled. Even the resources of the versatile Greek tongue were hardly adequate to the expression of his conceptions. He found congenial subjects only among the gods and demigods of mythology or the tragical events of the heroic period. His genius enabled him to give life and shape to the vast and the supernatural, as few others have done—and most effectively, though his plot is always simple.

Sir Walter Scott thus speaks of Æschylus in his Essay on the Drama:—“At his summons, the mysterious and tremendous volume of destiny, in which are inscribed the dooms of gods and men, seemed to display its leaves of iron before the appalled spectators; the more than mortal voices of deities, Titans, and departed heroes, were heard in awful conference; Olympus bowed, and its divinities descended; earth yawned, and gave up the pale spectres of the dead; and the yet more undefined and grisly forms of those infernal deities who struck horror into the gods themselves. All this could only be dared and done by a poet of the highest order.”

But seven of the seventy-five tragedies of Æschylus are extant. Of these, “Prometheus Chained” is considered the greatest, and from it we have selected our extracts. The opening scene is laid on the grim ocean’s shore near frowning Caucasus, to which, in obedience to Jove’s command, the giant Prometheus is to be chained. For thirty thousand years a vulture is to tear his vitals, constantly growing out afresh, as a punishment for his having given fire to mortals, and taught them useful arts in opposition to the will of heaven. Strength and Force, grandly personified, drag the victim to the place of torture; and Vulcan, the god of fire, rivets his fetters to the rock. The chorus is composed of sea-nymphs, who come to offer their sympathy to the sufferer and advise him to submit; but Prometheus, who is the em[Pg 197]bodiment of stern independence, fortitude, and decision, endures unyieldingly to the last. Even amid “the thunder’s deepening roar, blazing wreaths of lightning, and eddying sands whirled on high,” while the earth rocks to its centre, and “boisterous billows rise, confounding sea and sky,” he hurls a proud defiance at his oppressors.

SCENE FROM PROMETHEUS CHAINED.

Prometheus may be regarded as typifying the spirit of progress, bound by the shackles of inevitable destiny, chafing under its enslavement, but enduring contumely and suffering rather than yield to tyranny. The weird wail of Io on leaving Prometheus, wrung from her by the persecution of Juno, is thus rendered by Mrs. Browning, with all the wildness and fire of the original:—

[Pg 200]

EXTANT PLAYS OF ÆSCHYLUS.

• Prometheus Chained.
• Seven against Thebes. Founded on the siege of Thebes by seven Argive chiefs, who espouse the cause of Polyni’ces against his brother Ete’ocles, the latter having seized the crown contrary to agreement. A great favorite, and the poet’s special pride.
• The Persians. Subject, the overthrow of Xerxes: thought to be the oldest Greek drama extant.
• The Suppliants. Danaus and his fifty daughters solicit of the king of Argos protection from their enemies. The weakest of the seven.
• Agamemnon. The murder of Agamemnon, on his return from Troy, by his wife Clytemnestra and her paramour Ægisthus, is the material part of the plot.
• Choëphoræ (libation-bearers). Based on the avenging of the crime by Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, who slays his mother and her guilty partner.
• The Furies. Here we have the pursuit of the parricide by the Furies.—Clytemnestra, the Lady Macbeth of the Greek stage; her deep-laid plan, her cunning welcome of her husband, the fatal strokes dealt by her own hand, her fiendish glorying in the deed of blood,—touched with masterly skill.

The three tragedies last named constitute what is called a trilogy, or group of three dramas founded upon one story. “Prometheus Chained” was one of a trilogy, of which the other two members are lost.

Sophocles (495-405 B.C.), the rival of Æschylus, was born at Colo’nus, an Attic borough a short mile from the capital. He was fortunate in having a father able to give him a liberal education, and entered the service of the Muses at an early age. His skill in music and the exercises of the gymnasium won him many a garland; and when hardly sixteen, unrobed[Pg 201] and crowned, he led the choir of boys with his ivory lyre in the chant of triumph which the Athenians poured forth round the trophy raised at Salamis.

Sophocles made his début as a tragic writer in that successful contest with Æschylus which, some think, cost Athens her grand old dramatist. Fame spread the news, and Greece looked to Sophocles as the coming man. A succession of plays extended his popularity. He added nineteen prizes to the one wrested from Æschylus in 468 B.C. In the year 440 he completed the drama of “Antig’one,” the oldest of his seven surviving tragedies, which secured for him an important official position. The “Antigone” ushered in the most active portion of its author’s literary life, during which eighty-one of his pieces were written. Although history throws little light on this period of his career, we know that, unlike his great contemporaries, he never left his native city to enjoy the munificence of foreign patrons. The Greek theatre was indebted to him for a third actor, improvements in scenery, and a further modification of the chorus, which no longer took an active part in the play.

In his eightieth year, Sophocles was charged with imbecility by an ungrateful son, who regarded with jealous eyes his partiality for a favorite grandchild, and hoped in this way to obtain control of his property. The defence of the alleged dotard was to read before his judges a choral song from a play which he had just finished—“Œdipus at Colonus” (p. 206). The vindication was complete; the judges at once rendered a decision in the old poet’s favor, and in a burst of enthusiasm bore him home in triumph. He died at the age of ninety. Some tell us that while he was repeating the pathetic plaints of his “Antigone,” his breath suddenly ceased; others, that after gaining a tragic victory, he died of excessive joy as the crown was placed on his brow. He left the Athenians 113 dramas.

[Pg 202]

Style of Sophocles.—As Æschylus is the impersonation of grandeur, so is Sophocles of beauty and harmony. He descends from the sublime heights Æschylus loved to tread, and, appealing to our sympathy with humanity, finds his way into the secret chambers of the heart. His language is pure; his style, elegant, dignified, vivacious—faultless; in allusion to his sweet diction, he was called by the ancients the Bee of Attica. The type of manly beauty and intellectual power, æsthetic culture and lofty morality, it seems as if Sophocles had been “specially created to represent Greek art in its most refined and exquisitely balanced perfection.”

The Masterpiece of Sophocles is “King Œdipus.” Laïus, a Theban monarch, told by an oracle (such was the legend) that his children would be the cause of his death, had his infant son Œdipus exposed on Mount Cithæron, hoping thus to escape his destiny. But the boy was discovered by some herdsmen and carried to Corinth, where he grew to man’s estate as the adopted son and heir of the king.

Warned at the Delphic shrine to beware of his native land lest he should imbrue his hands in his father’s blood, and believing Corinth to be his birthplace, he withdrew to Thebes; but on the way he met Laïus, and, not knowing who he was, killed him in a quarrel. Arrived at Thebes, he won the hand of the widow Jocasta, his own mother, who bore him four children. All went well for a time. At length, however, an epidemic broke out; and the oracle assigned as its cause the presence of the late king’s murderer. Œdipus strained every nerve to discover the offender, and at last, to his horror, fastened the crime, and the more terrible guilt of parricide, upon himself. Unhappy Jocasta hanged herself in the palace, and Œdipus in his frenzy beat out his eyes with her gold-embossed buckles.

The play opens at Thebes, during the plague. Œdipus, in conversation with a priest and Creon, Jocasta’s brother, is in[Pg 203]formed of Apollo’s will,—that, to avert the evil, the land must be purified by the punishment of the assassin. After the catastrophe above related, blinded Œdipus bemoans his lot in heart-rending utterances, but finally accepts his fate with resignation. We give the

CLOSING SCENE OF KING ŒDIPUS.

Œdipus ended his days in exile at Colonus, where he was received by Theseus, the hero of Attica, and attended to the last by his faithful daughter Antigone. His death is the subject of the play “Œdipus at Colonus,” written at the close of the poet’s life and reflecting the gentleness and serenity of his last days. It contains one of the gems of Sophocles—that chorus which has immortalized the lovely scenery about Colonus—which the old poet recited before the Athenian judges to prove his sanity. Bulwer furnishes us a spirited version of this famous passage:—The chorus informs the outcast Œdipus that he has come to Colonus,

[Pg 206]

EXTANT PLAYS OF SOPHOCLES.

• King Œdipus: this and the next two tragedies form a trilogy.
• Œdipus at Colonus: well adapted to flatter the local pride of the Athenians.
• Antigone: based on the story of “the Seven against Thebes.” Antigone was the daughter of Œdipus. Her uncle, King Creon, forbids the burial of her brother Polyni’ces, the instigator of the war and one of its victims. Sisterly affection proves stronger than fear of the royal decree; Antigone performs the last sad offices for her brother, and is entombed alive for her disobedience.
• The Trachinian Women: subject, the poisoning of Hercules by his wife Deïanira.
• Electra: called from the heroine, Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, who is overpowered by hatred for her unnatural mother and Ægisthus. The plot culminates with the slaughter of the guilty pair by Orestes the avenger. Finest passage, the meeting between Orestes and his sister.
• Ajax: founded upon the madness of Ajax in consequence of the bestowal of Achilles’ arms on Ulysses in preference to himself; his suicide and funeral. [Pg 207]
• Philocte’tes: the hero was a Thessalian prince, whom the Greeks treacherously abandoned on the island of Lemnos. Afterward, when informed by the oracle that Troy would not fall until the arrows of Hercules, which Philoctetes had, were brought to bear on its defenders, they induced him to take part in the war.

Euripides.—In 480 B.C., on the island of Salamis, while the battle that was to decide the future of Greece raged in the neighboring waters, Euripides first saw the light. Æschylus, in his prime, was at the time bravely fighting on an Athenian galley; while Sophocles, but fifteen years of age, stood ready, should the gods grant his countrymen success, to celebrate the victory with the arts in which he excelled.

The third of the illustrious tragic trio was carefully trained; painting, rhetoric, and philosophy, besides the customary gymnastic exercises, engaged his attention; and he had not attained his eighteenth year when he finished his first drama. Not, however, until 441 B.C. did he, by winning the tragic prize, verify a prediction made before his birth that he would be crowned with sacred chaplets.

His reputation was now secure; and though he was exposed to bitter partisan attacks, his plays became widely popular. The philosopher Socrates always went to see them performed, and is even suspected of having had a hand in their composition. So great was the estimation in which they were held at Syracuse, that, after the surrender of the Athenian armies which had attempted the reduction of that city (413 B.C.), such of the soldiers as could teach their captors verses of Euripides were exempted from the cruelties inflicted on their fellows, and sent home to thank the author for their liberty. Athens itself is said to have been saved nine years later, when the Spartan general Lysander was minded to lay it in ashes, by the singing of a chorus of Euripides at the triumphal banquet; who could raise his[Pg 208] hand against the city of one that had discoursed poetry so sweet?

Like his brother tragedians, Euripides drew his subjects from the mythical history of his country. His plays numbered seventy-five, some say ninety-two; and the best of them rank with the best pieces on the roll of dramatic literature. He composed slowly and with care. On one occasion, it is related, when he had completed only four verses in three days, Euripides was told by a poetaster that in the same time he had produced a hundred. “And yours,” replied the great man, “will live for three days; mine, forever.”

Euripides spent the last two years of his life at the Macedonian court, then the abode of many illustrious men. He went there in search of rest, but found that he had only exchanged persecution at home for jealousy abroad. The honors heaped upon him by the Macedonian prince, together with his own superior genius, raised him up enemies. In the king’s savage hounds, if we may credit the legend, they saw the means of removing an obnoxious rival; and while Euripides was walking in his patron’s garden, he was attacked and fatally mangled by the fierce brutes (406 B.C.).

Athens felt the loss, and went into mourning at news of his death; vainly she supplicated the Macedonian king for his ashes. They were magnificently interred at Pella; while his country was forced to remain content with a statue, and a cenotaph on which was inscribed, “All Greece is the monument of Euripides.” His verses, as he predicted, were immortal; admiration of them led an epigrammatist to write:

With Euripides, the glory of the Athenian stage descended[Pg 209] into the tomb; and Tragedy found no one worthy to fill his place till Shakespeare’s day.

Style of Euripides.—Sophocles once remarked that he represented men as they ought to be, Euripides as they are. This holding of the mirror up to nature was what Athenian taste began to demand; Euripides had the tact to see what was wanted, and the genius to make the innovation successfully. His heroes and heroines talked and acted like men and women of the day; hence he has been accused of degrading his art by introducing the commonplace into his dramas, of lowering Greek tragedy to the level of every-day life.

A more serious charge also was laid at his door—that of impiety. Euripides rejected the faith of his fathers; we need not, therefore, look in his plays for the religious fervor of Æschylus, or even for the high moral tone of Sophocles. In one of his lines the doctrine of mental reservation appears,

a sentiment which led to his prosecution for justifying perjury.

While Euripides was inferior to Æschylus in majesty, to Sophocles in symmetry and finish, he surpassed both in delineating character, and particularly in representing the human passions. He was the most pathetic of the three, and in the portraiture of woman stands second to no poet, ancient or modern. His heroines are his master-figures. Traces of art are sometimes apparent in his writings, and occasionally he verges on the sensational.

The Mede’a is the chef d’œuvre of this author. Its plot is derived from the story of Medea, a Colchian princess proficient in sorcery. She won the love of the Greek prince Jason, who came to Colchis in the ship Argo to obtain pos[Pg 210]session of the Golden Fleece, helped him to secure the object of his search, and eloped with him to Greece. But when Jason beheld the fair Glaucè, daughter of the King of Corinth, he resolved to thrust aside Medea in favor of his new love, forgetful of the dark power of the enchantress.

The opening scene is laid at Corinth, after the nuptials of Jason and Glaucè. The infidelity of her husband has transformed Medea into a tigress, whose conflicting passions the poet touches with consummate skill—the anger of the dishonored wife, the love of the tender mother, the steeling of the woman’s heart against its deep affection, the all-absorbing thirst for vengeance.

The play ends with Medea’s terrible revenge. Banished by the king from Corinth, she begs for one day of preparation, in which she sends to the bride a costly robe and golden wreath poisoned by her fell arts. The unsuspecting Glaucè smilingly arrays herself in these presents; but her smiles give place to shrieks of agony as the enchanted garments burn into her flesh and the chaplet blazes in her hair. Her father tries to save her, and perishes in her flaming embrace. Medea completes her work by the murder of her two children—Jason’s sons—and after jeering at her husband’s grief disappears with the corpses in a chariot whirled through the air by dragons.

One of the most affecting passages in Euripides is found in

MEDEA’S LAST WORDS TO HER SONS.

EXTANT PLAYS OF EURIPIDES.

• Alcestis, first represented 438 B.C.
  Medea, ” 431 ”
  Hippol’ytus, ” 428 ”
  Hecuba, ” 423 ”
  Heracli’dæ, ” 421 ”
• The Suppliants.
• Ion.
• The Raging Hercules.
• Andromache.
• The Trojan Women, 415 B.C.: pathetic by reason of the plaints of the captive women.
• Electra, first represented 413 B.C.
• Helen,   first represented 412 ”
• Iphigeni’a at Tauris.
• Orestes, 408 B.C.: demoralizing in its portraiture of crime.
• The Phœnician Women.
• The Female Bacchanalians: produced at the Macedonian court.
• Iphigenia at Aulis: not acted till after the author’s death.
• Cyclops: a satyric drama (chorus of satyrs).

Lost Tragedies.—Dramatic literature has sustained an irreparable loss, not only in the missing plays of the three great masters, but also in those numberless works of their contemporaries and occasionally successful competitors now buried in oblivion. From the allusions of two or three Greek authors, a few meagre particulars may be gleaned, now of one, now of another—but they only serve to make us more painfully conscious of our loss.

Greek Comedy.—Comedy was older than tragedy in Greece. Thirty years before the time of Thespis, Susa’rion of Meg’ara, in his burlesque exhibitions, improved somewhat on the extempore jests and village-songs of the Bacchic revellers, and hence has been called the inventor of comedy. Susarion was no great lover of the fair sex, if we may judge by an ungallant sentiment of his which has been preserved: “Woman is a curse, but we cannot conduct our household affairs without this curse; therefore to marry is an evil, and not to marry is an evil.” Perhaps he had taken to wife a Xantippe.

The poet Epicharmus, also of Megara, but the Sicilian city of that name, first committed his effusions to writing; he was[Pg 213] the author of thirty-five comedies, some of them on subjects not mythological.

The development of comedy, however, was interrupted. The Tragic Muse enforced her claims at the expense of her elder sister, and the latter was for a season neglected. But the flourishing era of republican Athens, when the poet was free to lash whom he chose, saw comedy restored to the favor of the satire-loving people. It may be said to have been perfected by Aristophanes. He not only ridiculed the follies and vices of the day, laid bare family secrets on the stage, and edified his audiences by caricaturing the rich and great with masks and costumes which reproduced their peculiarities, but fearlessly assailed the government. When all others shrunk from playing so dangerous a rôle, he himself performed the part of the insolent demagogue Cleon (originally a leather-dresser), whom he mercilessly “cut into sandal-strips” in his “Knights.”

Even the gods were not slighted by the comic poets. The gourmand Hercules devours as fast as the cook can prepare victuals; Prometheus is protected from the elements by an umbrella; Bacchus swaggers as a fop and coward. Comedy in the hands of Aristophanes and his contemporaries was to the Athenians what our press is to us, but went still further. Always personal and sometimes scurrilous in its attacks, too often coarse and licentious in its tone, it yet doubtless accomplished much good in restraining political ambition, checking public corruption, and modifying the prevailing faults of society.

Aristophanes.—The oldest comedies extant are those of Aristophanes, a citizen of Athens by birth or adoption, born about the middle of the fifth century B.C. If he was an adopted son, Athens had good reason to be proud of her protégé. His society was sought by the learned and great. He became the idol of the people, who fined such as brought libel[Pg 214]suits against him, and voted him an olive crown for exposing the misconduct of their rulers.

Nor was his fame confined to Athens. All Greece, and Sicily too, laughed at his humorous sallies. The Persian king enjoyed his pungent satires, and regarded him as such a power in Greece that when Spartan ambassadors sought an alliance with Persia against their Athenian rivals, the king asked on which side the comic poet was arrayed; for, said he, “the party whose cause Aristophanes espouses will certainly win.”

Aristophanes was loyal to the true interests of his country, and declined the flattering invitations of Dionysius to dwell in ease at Syracuse with the luminaries of his age. He longed for the glorious Athens of the past, and attacked whatever conflicted with his conservative ideas. None escaped his well-aimed shafts. He was specially severe on the Sophists, a new class of teachers at Athens, whose forte lay in chopping logic and splitting hairs, and who taught the tricks of rhetoric rather than practical morality. In his “Clouds” he derides their sharp practices and unsound system of education, striking them over the head of Socrates, the exponent of true philosophy, whose life was devoted to combating the false teachings of these very pretenders.

That Socrates was merely the scape-goat is plain, for he and Aristophanes were intimate friends. When the play was first exhibited, the philosopher, who was in the audience, took it all in good part, and even rose that the people might compare him with the caricature presented, which exaggerated his eccentricities of dress and figure—his pug-nose, thick lips, shabby garments, and absent-minded stare. The chorus of changing clouds symbolized the meretricious charms of sophistry.

“The Clouds” opens in the sleeping-apartment of Strepsi’ades, an Athenian citizen, his son Pheidippides occupying a pallet near him. The slaves of the household are abed in an adjoining room. Strepsiades, oppressed by debt incurred[Pg 215] through the extravagance of his “precious son,” a fast young man addicted to fast horses, is disturbed by the recollection of numerous outstanding bills and notes about to mature. He wakes before daylight and calls a slave:—

Strepsiades finally bethinks him of a plan for paying his debts. He will have his son trained by the Sophists; and when the creditors bring the case into court, Pheidippides shall plead his cause, and defeat them with fallacious arguments even in the face of a thousand witnesses. Father and son at once arise, dress, and walk out in the direction of the Sophists’ school. Arrived in front of it, Strepsiades remarks:—

Failing to induce his son to enter the Thinking-school, Strepsiades resolves himself to master the fashionable Argument that “pays no bills;” he has an interview with Socrates, and is introduced to the Clouds, the new goddesses of this misty philosophy.

One of the most beautiful passages of the play—having the ring of the true metal—is the chorus of Clouds responding to the call of Socrates—first, behind the scenes, in the distance; then nearer; then rising from the lips of twenty-four gauze-clad nymphs, who descend upon the stage as personifications of the ethereal deities.

But though the Clouds assist Socrates in teaching Strepsiades, the pupil proves an utter dunce. Finally, in a moment of impatience, Socrates kicks him out of the school.

At last Pheidippides is prevailed upon to study with the Sophists. He proves an apt scholar, rapidly developing into an unprincipled scamp. When his education as a sharper is completed, he brings to bear his specious arguments against the creditors, and cheats them out of their dues. So far, so good; but his notions of filial duty have also been greatly modified by the instructions of Socrates. A quarrel arising in the family, he hesitates not to fall upon his father with a cudgel, and threatens to do the same by his mother if she provokes him.

With a curse upon Socrates, the outraged old gentleman calls his slaves, hurries to the Thinking-school, and sets fire to the building. Thus the play ends.

Beneath the pleasantry of Aristophanes is a substratum of solid sense; as is apparent in “the Birds,” an ingenious play in which the woodland songsters take characters. It was pro[Pg 219]duced at a time when the Athenians, puffed up with vanity, confidently looked for the reduction of Sicily and the dominion of Greece. Aristophanes alone, at this critical period, ventured to raise the note of warning, and satirize their foolish ambition. The choruses in this drama ring with the sweet music of the wild woods; they were rendered by twenty-four performers plumed so as to represent as many different kinds of birds. The Hoopoe thus calls his fellows to a mass-meeting:—

Style of Aristophanes.—In weighing the merits of Aristophanes, it must be remembered that many of his peculiar beauties cannot be translated, and that we lose his local hits from our inability to see things from an Athenian standpoint. He is often indelicate in his allusions; he is as ready with town slang and the cant of the shop as with the most elegant phrase. But Attic salt seasons the whole, and none ever handled the versatile Greek tongue more deftly. In his command of language, he is equalled only by Plato, who felt the comic poet’s power when he said that in the soul of Aristophanes the Graces sought an imperishable shrine. Amid all his humor and buffoonery sparkles genius of the highest order. His aim seems to have been to elevate his art. Some of the improvements he claimed to have introduced, are thus set forth in an address which he puts into the mouth of the leader of the chorus in his “Peace:”—

[Pg 221]

Aristophanes outlived the license of the old comedy, which died with liberty. When in 404 B.C. the popular government was overthrown, and Thirty Tyrants, supported by Sparta, lorded it over Athens, a statute was passed making personal attacks on the stage capital offences; an actor who defied the law was actually starved to death. Thenceforth the comic poet dared not individualize the object of his satire; he tilted against vice and folly in general, or thrust at his intended victims indirectly under assumed names.

Aristophanes died about 380 B.C. No other comic poet could vie with him during his lifetime; none worthy to be his successor arose after his death, for “Nature broke the mould in which he was cast.” Of fifty-four comedies from his pen, eleven remain entire.

HISTORY.

During this halcyon age of Greek poetry, prose also was cultivated, and in the century following the Persian Wars it was brought to maturity. After the victories that secured her freedom, Greece felt the need of a national historian to record[Pg 222] the story of her struggles and triumphs. The earliest narrators, as has been shown, confined themselves to mythology and tradition: the times now demanded an artist who could paint with faithful pencil on living canvas those scenes that were the glory of Hellas—and in Herodotus of Halicarnassus that artist appeared.

Herodotus (born 484 B.C.).—Halicarnassus was the capital of a Dorian confederacy of states in southern Asia Minor. Its queen Artemisia supported Xerxes in his quarrel with Greece; and although the Athenians, provoked that a woman should take the field against them, offered an immense reward for her capture, she escaped the perils of war, and carried her kingdom safely through the political troubles of the time.

The parents of Herodotus were persons of rank and property. His writings prove him to have been well read in the literature of his country. Though not an Ionian born, he adopted the Ionic dialect—the dress in which Greek prose first appeared.

Herodotus spent the best twenty years of his life in travelling over the greater part of the known world, studying the history, geography, and customs of the countries he visited. Thebes and Memphis, Tyre and Jerusalem, Babylon and Ecbat’ana—with all he made personal acquaintance, extending his tour as far west as the Greek settlements in Italy, and as far south as the first cataract of the Nile.

The marvellousness of the stories he collected brought down upon Herodotus the ridicule of his fellow-citizens; so quitting Halicarnassus when about thirty-seven years of age, he settled at Athens. Here, it is related, he read his history, still in the rough, to the admiring people, who voted him a handsome reward. Here also he seems to have become intimate with Sophocles and his great contemporaries; and here, perhaps, his ambition was kindled to add another star to the galaxy that made Athens the glory of the world.

[Pg 223]

Not long, however, did Herodotus remain at the capital. As one of a band of colonists sent out by Pericles in 443 B.C., he crossed to Italy, and aided in founding the town of Thurii, near the ruins of Syb’aris (see Map, p. 304). At Thurii he spent his last years in revising, enlarging, and polishing his history; yet we are not to believe that he ceased to indulge his passion for travelling when Sicily and southern Italy lay so invitingly before him. He died at the age of sixty, leaving the great work of his life unfinished.

The main subject of our author’s work is the Græco-Persian War and the triumph of his country. His narrative is from time to time relieved by delightful episodes. Indeed, we owe to him not a few of those romantic tales that invest ancient history with its peculiar charm; while modern research has verified many of the wonder-stories that provoked the derision of his countrymen. Nor do his digressions mar the unity of his history, which is planned and developed as skilfully as a drama of Sophocles.

The style of Herodotus is poetical, clear, familiar, fascinating, and marked by a pleasing variety. “His animation,” says Macaulay, “his simple-hearted tenderness, his wonderful talent for description and dialogue, and the pure sweet flow of his language, place him at the head of narrators.” His history is the first work of its kind that has descended to us entire. It is divided into nine books, said to have been read by the author at the Olympic Games, and there to have received the names of the Nine Muses, which they still bear.[34] Certainly no names could have been more appropriately connected with a work that has entitled its author to be called through all time “the Father of History.”—Extracts follow:—

[Pg 224]

XERXES AND THE PILOT.

ANECDOTE OF QUEEN NITOCRIS.

CUSTOMS OF THE BABYLONIANS.

Thucydides, on whom the mantle of Herodotus descended, was born in a village of Attica about 471 B.C. We may believe that he received a polite education, and became proficient in military science at an early age. It was in the prime of manhood, if the oft-repeated story is to be credited, that the history of Herodotus, read before an assembled throng, brought tears to his eyes and fired him with a desire to emulate its distinguished author. Greece was then on the eve of the Peloponnesian War, in which the rival states Athens and Sparta figured as chief actors. Thucydides anticipated the impending storm, and discerned his opportunity; this war should be his subject, and even before it began he was busy collecting preliminary information.

[Pg 226]

Nor did he serve his country merely in the capacity of historian. He engaged actively in the contest, and received as his reward the command of an Athenian squadron. But he committed an unpardonable sin by failing to save a town, which surrendered to the Spartans before he could arrive with assistance. Instigated by Cleon, his countrymen deprived him of his position and cast him forth an exile.

Thucydides retired to Thrace, where he had a valuable interest in certain gold-mines, and there devoted himself to the preparation of his history, narrowly watching the progress of events and gathering intelligence with the utmost care. His exile of twenty years was indeed “the Muses’ blessing;” it enabled him to pursue his studies without interruption. Long after his death, the plane-tree in whose shadow he was accustomed to compose, was pointed out to travellers.

Thucydides traced the Peloponnesian War to the middle of its twenty-first year (411 B.C.), leaving it to be finished by another. Why he did not complete it himself, being in possession of the necessary materials, does not appear. After the Athenian power was broken by Sparta (404 B.C.), the decree of banishment was revoked; but whether Thucydides ever returned to Athens is a matter of doubt. According to one account, he went back to fall the victim of a conspiracy; from another we are led to infer that he died a natural death in Thrace about 391 B.C.

The “History of the Peloponnesian War” is remarkable for its accuracy and impartiality. Truth was the great object of its author, who, dispassionate and unprejudiced, ignores the ingratitude of his country, betrays no resentment even when he speaks of Cleon, and does full justice to his Spartan foes. He intended his work to be an authority, “a possession for everlasting.” In it we find the first attempts to treat the philosophy of history, to trace events to their ultimate causes, and deduce from the past lessons for the future. His[Pg 227] style is nervous, concise, stately, and even rises to the sublime; but lacks harmony, and is sometimes obscure. About one fourth of his work is composed of speeches, which indeed make an agreeable variety, but are often involved, and in parts all but unintelligible. Antithesis is a frequent figure.

Despite its faults, the history of Thucydides has always been a favorite. Charles V. was never without a copy when on a campaign, and the philosopher Hobbes declared that he valued its eight books above all the rest of Greek historical literature. The extract selected is a description of the plague which broke out at Athens in the year 430, while the Lacedæmonians were ravaging Attica, and which the historian contracted himself, but fortunately survived.

THE PLAGUE AT ATHENS.

Xenophon, who in his “Hellenica” continued the story of the Peloponnesian War left unfinished by Thucydides, and carried the history of Greece as far as the battle of Mantine’a, 362 B.C., was born at Athens shortly after the middle of the fifth century. Of his early life we know nothing, save that he was the friend and pupil of Socrates; who, it is related, prepossessed with his intelligent countenance, once stopped him in a narrow way and demanded where men were made good and honest. Confused by the unexpected inquiry from so great a teacher, the boy hesitated; whereupon, the philosopher exclaimed, “Follow me and learn.” Xenophon obeyed, and became a faithful student of his master’s moral and philosophical doctrines. Together they braved the perils of the Peloponnesian War; and in the battle of De’lium (424 B.C.), where the flower of Athens’ chivalry fell, Xenophon’s life is said to have been saved by Socrates.

At the solicitation of his friend, Proxenus the Bœotian, Xenophon joined as a volunteer the famous Expedition of the Ten Thousand, made in the interest of Cyrus the Younger against his elder brother Artaxerxes, who occupied the Persian throne. Feeling the necessity of securing soldiers superior in bravery and discipline to the barbarian hordes through which he must cut his way to the capital, Cyrus supported the Spartans in the Peloponnesian War, in order to secure their aid in dethroning Artaxerxes. Accordingly, at his summons, about 10,000 Spartans and other Greeks, deceived at first as to the real object of the campaign, flocked to his standard, and in the spring of 401 B.C., with 100,000 Eastern troops, entered the confines of the Persian Empire.

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On the plain of Cunaxa, ninety miles from Babylon, the decisive battle took place between the brothers, Artaxerxes having at his back an army of nearly a million men. Superior numbers, however, availed little against the superior discipline of the Greeks, who quickly routed the wing opposed to them; but Cyrus, already hailed as king, imprudently spurred into the disordered ranks of the foe, and was struck down while engaged in a furious hand-to-hand conflict with Artaxerxes.

The fall of Cyrus was the signal for his Asiatic troops to disperse, and the victors found themselves deserted in the heart of the enemy’s country, more than 1,200 miles from home. Their generals were soon after seized at a conference and put to death. In this crisis, by the advice of Xenophon, inspired as he tells us by a dream, new leaders were chosen, he himself in the place of his friend Proxenus, one of the murdered chiefs. A retreat was determined upon; and during fifteen months of indescribable hardships, he was the patient guide, the sympathetic but vigilant and prudent commander. At last, from a mountain height, the glittering Euxine broke upon the view of the van, a glad shout rent the air—“the Sea! the Sea!”—proclaiming that their sufferings were over, while officers and soldiers wept in each other’s arms. Here, in the neighborhood of Greek settlements, they were safe, and the march home was easy. The 8,600 survivors owed their lives to Xenophon.

This “Retreat” of the Greeks is the subject of Xenophon’s graphic and interesting history in seven books, the “Anabasis” (march up, though most of the work is occupied with what happened on the march down). The chaste, simple style of the author, who throughout modestly speaks of himself in the third person, recommends his pages to readers of every class. He writes to the point; there is no straining for effect. We extract the passage relating to

[Pg 231]

XENOPHON’S DREAM.

For his sympathy with Sparta, and possibly for sharing the opinions of his beloved teacher Socrates, Xenophon was banished from Athens; but he was recompensed by the Lacedæ[Pg 233]monians with a house and piece of land in E’lis. Here, amid lovely meadows and woodlands, he built a temple to the goddess Diana in fulfilment of a vow he had made when encircled by dangers in Asia. Here, free from the cares of public life, he passed many years, happy in the society of his wife, children, and friends, dividing his time among his farm, his hunting-parks, and his study. He died at the age of ninety.—Of his two sons, one fell on the field of Mantinea, after dealing the great Epaminondas his death-blow.

Besides the “Anabasis” and “Hellenica,” Xenophon wrote the “Cy’ropædi’a”(education of Cyrus—the elder Cyrus, king of Persia), a semi-didactic, semi-historical fiction, illustrating a model system of education and setting forth his ideal of government—a perfect monarchy. He is also the author of several works written in defence of Socrates or as expositions of his philosophy, of which the “Memorabilia” (memoirs) is particularly interesting, teeming as it does with sayings and anecdotes of the sage.

In addition to his merits as an historian, Xenophon may justly claim the distinction of having been the first essayist: we have from his pen essays on the Policy of Lacedæmon, on the Chase, Horsemanship, and Cavalry Tactics, not to mention several political treatises ascribed to him. A creditable representative of elegant Attic prose, Xenophon has been called the Attic Muse.

Ctesias, a Greek physician attached to the Persian court, who dressed the wounds of Artaxerxes after the battle of Cunaxa, compiled a history of Persia in twenty-three books, a description of India, and a variety of other works. Of his writings, which were in the Ionic dialect, little has survived.

Theopompus (probably 378-304 B.C.) is also worthy of mention as an historian. He wrote a History of Greece from 411 to 394 B.C., and “Philippica,” in fifty-eight books, in which he sketched the character of Philip of Macedon. Of the latter[Pg 234] work numerous fragments remain. Ancient critics give him credit for general accuracy, though he took rather too rose-colored views of his hero Philip as the promoter of Grecian civilization.

PHILOSOPHY.

The earliest philosophical investigations were made by Ionians, and Thales of Miletus is recognized as the founder of Greek philosophy. To him and to Pythagoras the various systems may all be traced.

The Ionic School of Thales, devoted to physical science, rapidly developed, theory after theory being brought forward to explain the universe and the nature of Deity. One philosopher made the Supreme Being an all-pervading, divine air; another, Heracli’tus “the Obscure,” represented God as a subtile flame, and reduced the universe to an eternal fire.

A notable step in advance was taken by Anaxagoras (500-428 B.C.), who succeeded to the leadership of this school. The first to make the study of philosophy fashionable at Athens, he became the instructor of some of her great men, Socrates among the number. He represented God as a divine mind, acting on the material world with intelligence and design. Well did Aristotle say that Anaxagoras was like a sober man among stammering drunkards, when compared with earlier philosophers. As an astronomer, he anticipated some of the discoveries of more recent times; he correctly explained eclipses, taught that the sun was a molten ball, that from it the moon borrowed her light, that the lunar surface was diversified with mountains and valleys, and that the earth itself had been the scene of terrible convulsions.

The Italic School had meanwhile been founded by Pythag’oras, of Samos, born about 540 B.C. He settled in Croto’na, a Greek town of southern Italy, and there imparted to his disciples the philosophical principles which he had gathered in other lands, particularly Egypt.

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Pythagoras modestly styled himself a lover of wisdom (philosopher), not a wise man (sophist). Among his doctrines were the mysterious theory that number is the first principle of all things, the transmigration of souls, and a system of future rewards and punishments. He forestalled Copernicus in his discovery of the true theory of the solar system—that the sun, and not the earth, as was then believed, is its centre; he taught that the moon was inhabited and described the heavenly bodies as producing harmonious tones in their passage through ether, from which his followers were accustomed to say that to him the gods had revealed “the music of the spheres.”

With such perfect confidence did his disciples regard their master, who usually gave his instructions from behind a thick curtain, that when any one called their doctrines in question they deemed it sufficient to reply, “He said so” (ipse dixit). Indeed, they invested him with supernatural powers, nor, according to his early biographers, did he deny the soft impeachment. On one occasion, we are told, to convince his pupils that he was a god, he showed them his thigh, which was of gold, and declared that he had assumed the form of humanity only the more readily to impart his lessons to mankind.

Pythagoras was the inventor of the monochord, a one-stringed instrument designed to measure musical intervals,—and also of the more useful, if humbler, Multiplication Table. He is the first who practised mesmerism; at least so we may account for his subduing a fierce Daunian bear, and taming beasts and birds by gently passing his hands over their bodies.

There are no genuine remnants of this author. The celebrated “Golden Verses,” long attributed to him, there is reason for supposing to have been inspired by his teachings, but written by one of his pupils:—

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FROM THE GOLDEN VERSES.

As the Ionics made physics everything, so the Pythagoreans regarded mathematical science as the summum bonum. In their master’s eyes the world was “a living arithmetic,” and virtue a proportion of all the faculties of the soul. A mystical relation between mathematical and moral truths was a principle of his philosophy.

Prominent among the followers of Pythagoras was Empedocles, of Agrigentum in Sicily (450 B.C.), who combined the previous theories of nature in his own, viz., that four elements—earth, air, fire, and water—enter into the constitution of the universe, and that these are constantly animated by the two opposing forces of Love and Strife. A peculiar doctrine of his was that like is perceived only by like; thus our knowledge of other bodies is due to minute emanations from their substance which enter the pores and impress corresponding elements in our own frames.

Empedocles is said to have arrogated to himself the importance of a god, going about in a purple robe confined with a belt of gold, performing wonderful cures. According to an old legend, he sought to create the belief that he had been translated to heaven, by secretly throwing himself into the crater of Mt. Etna; but the volcano, in a subsequent eruption, cast forth one of his brazen sandals and so exposed the fraud. He probably lost his life by accident while examining the crater.

From the Italic School sprung the sects known as Eleatic,[Pg 237] Epicurean, and Skeptic. The Eleatic School was founded by Xenoph’anes (600-500 B.C.), a contemporary of Pythagoras, and derived its name from the town of E’lea in southern Italy.

Xenophanes asserted the unity of the Deity. “There is one god,” he said, “among gods and men the greatest: unlike to mortals in outward shape, unlike in mind and thoughts.” This was truly a sublime stand to take in an age of polytheism; he who feared not to face a superstitious people with such a doctrine, and ridicule even their divine Homer for his degrading pictures of the deities, deserves to be ranked among the greatest philosophers of Greece.

FRAGMENTS FROM XENOPHANES.

The noble conception of Deity entertained by Xenophanes was soon perverted. We find his pupil Parmen’ides “the Great” in the next century doing away with the personality of God, and confounding the divine nature with pure being, which he made equivalent to thought.

Democ’ritus, of Abde’ra in Thrace (460-357 B.C.), known[Pg 238] as the laughing philosopher from his constantly deriding the weaknesses of men, put forth the atomic theory,—that the universe is made up of countless minute, intangible atoms, and that in the motion of such atoms, round and fiery, consisted the movements of the mind and soul. God had no place in this philosophy; matter, time, space, and motion, were eternal. Bodies were formed by the fortuitous concurrence of atoms; and by the affinities and motions of atoms in the vacuum that made up the universe, all natural phenomena were produced.

Such was the wisdom of one who laughed at the follies of his fellows, and is stated to have put out his own eyes that nothing might distract the current of his thoughts.

School of Epicurus.—The materialism of Democritus was at a later day elaborated by Epicurus (born on Samos about 340 B.C.) into a system of philosophy which gained so many converts that we are told whole cities could not contain the friends and followers of its author. According to the Epicurean philosophy, chance governed the world of atoms; there was no life beyond the grave. The gods were immortal, but were mere figure-heads, enjoying an emotionless inactivity, indifferent alike to the vices and fortunes of men: most likely Epicurus did not believe in any gods at all, but allowed their existence, as nonentities, that he might not shock the prejudices of the Athenians. Pleasure he made the chief end of life; but with him pleasure was not sensual indulgence; it lay in freedom from pain, the sober exercise of reason, and the nobler enjoyments of man’s higher nature. Such a doctrine, it is plain, was but too easy of perversion. The pure, high-toned “pleasure” of the moral Epicurus degenerated with the voluptuaries and profligates that adopted his tenets into the vilest excesses, and the very name epicure is applied to one unduly addicted to the gratifying of the appetite.

The Skeptical Philosophy.—Pyrrho, who flourished about[Pg 239] 300 B.C., was the father of the Skeptics. They held that there was no standard of truth appreciable by the human mind; nothing can therefore be asserted as true. Pyrrho doubted everything; his disciples used to follow him, lest, in practically applying his theory, he should be run over in the streets or walk off a precipice.

The Socratic School.—When Socrates (470-399 B.C.) came upon the stage in the golden period of Athens, it was to denounce the atheistical philosophy of his predecessors, and take the field against the Sophists, who made endless disputation, fallacious but specious, the head and front of their system. “These word-snapping quibblers,” says Felton, “were prodigious favorites with the Athenians,—men who proved that right was wrong, and wrong right, and that there was neither wrong nor right; that knowing one thing is knowing everything, and that there is no such thing as knowing anything at all; that as the beautiful exists by the presence of beauty, so a man becomes an ass by the presence of an ass; and so on, ringing myriads of changes, like the fools in Shakespeare, upon these quirks of jugglery.”

Socrates had an effective way of dealing with these gentry. By cunningly contrived questions, which at first seemed to have no bearing on the point at issue, he led them on from admission to admission, until he involved them in absurdities and convicted them out of their own mouths.

For one like Socrates, the mythology of Greece was too gross, the speculations of the philosophy then current were too unreal and hollow. He aspired to something better. At length the unity of God, the soul’s immortality, and the moral responsibility of man, dawned upon his mind—sublime truths which he might well have drawn from revelation itself. The practice of virtue he inculcated as indispensable to happiness and true religion. A demon, or secret influence, he said, constantly attended him, and was his director in the work of[Pg 240] social reform no less than in the every-day affairs of life. Whether he deceived himself in this belief or strove to deceive others into it that he might gain credence for his doctrines, certain it is that his teachings exercised a most wholesome influence. All subsequent Greek philosophy is stamped with their impress. (See Blackie’s “Horæ Hellenicæ.”)

In his domestic relations, Socrates was not happy. Believing it incumbent on him to devote every moment to philosophical inquiry or exhortations of the people to practical morality, he was wont to neglect his legitimate business of stone-cutting, and leave his family to provide for its own support. This was too much for his good wife Xantippe. Something of a shrew even under the best of circumstances, we may imagine that she made his household rather hot, particularly when he brought guests home to dinner and there was nothing in the larder. On one occasion she went so far as to give emphasis to her reproaches with a shower of dish-water. The dripping philosopher, not in the least disturbed, calmly remarked, “I thought after so much thunder, we should have some rain.”

Socrates declined the invitation of a Macedonian prince to live in luxury at his court, with the characteristic reply, “At Athens meal is two-pence the measure, and water may be had for nothing.” He clung to Athens to the last, and so doing won a martyr’s crown. Accused of impiety in corrupting the religious belief of the young committed to his charge, he was condemned to drink the fatal hemlock. Surrounded by sorrowing disciples, who had bribed the jailer and vainly urged him to fly while there was yet time, he calmly placed the cup to his lips, and soon after passed away with not a doubt as to “the undiscovered country.” “I derive confidence,” said he, “from the hope that something of man remains after death, and that the condition of good men will then be much better than that of the bad.”

[Pg 241]

Socrates failed to commit his philosophy to writing; it is from the pages of Xenophon and Plato, his most devoted admirers, that we have learned his doctrines.

The principal schools that originated in the Socratic were the Academic, Peripatetic, Cynic, and Stoic.

Academic School.—Plato.—The Academic School was founded by Socrates’ pupil, Plato, and derived its name from the grove of Acade’mus, a public garden at Athens in which this philosopher was accustomed to deliver his lectures. Beneath its planes and olives flowed the stream Cephissus; statues and temples were scattered through its shade, and solitary paths invited to rest and meditation.

Grove of Academus.

[Pg 242]

Plato was noble-born, tracing his descent from King Codrus through one parent and from Solon through the other. His great genius was early seen. After mastering the elementary branches, he turned his attention to painting and poetry; but when he compared an epic on which he had tried his hand with Homer’s, he threw it into the fire in disgust. Chancing to hear Socrates discourse, he forthwith resolved to forsake the ornamental arts and study philosophy. So, when only twenty, Plato attached himself to Socrates; his admiration quickly ripened into an abiding affection; and for eight years he sat at the philosopher’s feet as a pupil, though now and then obtruding new theories of his own. In the dark days of his master’s trial and condemnation, he was still faithful; and when the judges silenced his speech in defence of Socrates, he would have resorted to the money-argument, which then, as now, seldom failed, had not the high-minded sage refused to secure life by such ignoble means.

After the execution of Socrates, Plato pursued his studies in foreign lands. He visited Italy, Sicily, and Egypt, carefully examining their different systems of philosophy, and possibly even making the acquaintance of the Hebrew Scriptures. During this tour he is related to have been sold into slavery at the instigation of Dionysius, tyrant of Syracuse, whom he had offended by his bold expressions.

On his return to Athens, in accordance with a long-cherished plan, Plato opened an humble dwelling in the grove of Academus for the reception of pupils, and founded the famous Academic School. He soon became the most popular man in Athens. Crowds thronged to his lectures and dialogues, which were free to all; and even ladies assumed male attire, that they might mingle unnoticed with the listeners and drink in the eloquence which flowed from his lips. His fame went abroad also. Foreign potentates sought his aid in adjusting political difficulties; and twice, by request, he returned to the[Pg 243] Syracusan court to effect a reform in the government—but in this case, without success.

On his eighty-second birthday, while he was pursuing his accustomed occupation, the stylus suddenly fell from Plato’s hand, and he expired. Under the trees so long associated with his kindly instruction, he found a final resting-place; an admiring country preserved his memory by altars and statues; and the verdict of succeeding generations has been that Plato was the greatest philosopher of antiquity.

Plato’s Philosophical System.—Plato was an enthusiast in the pursuit of truth. He believed in a personal God, rational, immutable, eternal. He realized that man could never attain absolute wisdom, possible to God alone; and looked upon philosophy as “a longing after heavenly wisdom.” He sought to correct abuses, to elevate humanity; and made man’s highest duty consist in searching out God and imitating the perfection of the Almighty as his rule of conduct. The four cardinal virtues were wisdom, temperance, courage, and justice; but none could be virtuous without aid from on high. (Read Bulkley’s “Plato’s Best Thoughts.”)

The soul, an emanation from the Supreme Mind, was immortal. It existed before its union with the body, and all earthly knowledge is but the recollection of what it possessed in some former state. When, disembodied, it stood face to face with kindred immaterial essences, it acquired those ideas, or forms, which figure so prominently in the Platonic system—interpreted by some to mean veritable objective existences too subtile to be discerned by the eye of flesh, and by others explained as mere intuitions or generalizations having no objective reality.

Plato regarded men as free agents, to be rewarded or punished in a future life for their deeds in this. His poetical fancy fixed on some distant star as the abode of the blessed. The earth he supposed to occupy the centre of the universe.[Pg 244] It was not eternal, but was made by an intelligent God, who breathed into it a soul; so it was a living creature, self-active, and gifted with the beautiful form of the sphere.

Nor did the philosopher forget to train the reasoning powers, by the study of mathematics. The importance he attached to this science may be inferred from the sign on his school: “Let no one enter here who is a stranger to geometry.” Plato has the honor of having been the inventor of geometrical analysis.

Plato’s Works, which have descended to us unimpaired, are in the form of dialogues—a delightful method of conveying philosophical instruction, when, as in Plato’s case, the personages introduced as speakers are salient characters, and their idiosyncrasies are maintained throughout with discrimination. The dull lessons of dialectics are thus enlivened by graphic portraitures and happy strokes of humor. Plato’s language is the perfection of Attic prose, beautified by a poetical tinge. “If Jupiter should speak Greek,” said ancient critics, “it would be Plato’s.” What Socrates dreamed on the night before the young Plato entered his school—that a cygnet came from the grove of Academus, and, after nestling on his breast for a time, took its flight heavenward, singing sweetly as it rose—is recorded as presaging his pupil’s sweet mastery of words.

The Platonic Dialogues, thirty-five in number, discuss various subjects. One of the finest is “Phædo,” written to prove the immortal nature of the soul. It derives its name from the beloved disciple of Socrates, who is here made by Plato, prevented from being present himself, to describe their master’s death-scene and repeat his last discourse. Full of sublime and poetical conceptions, the “Phædo” aims at lifting the mind above the sensual to the spiritual and eternal; at foreshadowing the joys of the heavenly state, and painting death as a thing to be desired rather than feared, since it is the por[Pg 245]tal of bliss. The philosopher Cleom’brotus, on reading this Dialogue, is said to have thrown himself into the sea to exchange this life for the better one pictured by Plato.

EXTRACT FROM PHÆDO.

(Socrates, having proved the immortality of the soul to the satisfaction of all present in the prison, addresses them as follows.)

In his “Republic,” Plato indulges in a political dream, sketching an ideal government and embodying his conception of absolute justice. In his “Atlantis,” he describes a large island lying west of Europe, which some have tried to connect with America.

The Academic School long survived its founder; but little if any advance was made by his successors. Its fundamental tenets outlived Greece and Rome, to reappear in the schools[Pg 247] of modern times. Many of them are in wonderful harmony with Christian doctrines; and such a resemblance to the Jewish Scriptures has been detected in the writings of their author that he has been called “the Attic Moses.”

Peripatetic School.—Aristotle.—The Peripatetic was an offshoot from the Academic School, its founder Aristotle having for twenty years studied under Plato. Its influence cannot be estimated; for 1,800 years, up to the revival of letters in modern times, its author was recognized as the supreme authority on every subject, whether by Moslem or Christian.

Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) was born at the Thracian town of Stagi’ra. Inheriting from his father literary tastes as well as the means to gratify them, he selected Athens as the scene of his labors, and there, at the age of seventeen, he entered the Academy of Plato. So energetically did he apply himself, not as a servile follower but often as a pioneer in new paths of his own, that his master said he required the bit rather than the spur, and styled him the Intellect of the school. On one occasion, when none but this ardent pupil was present to hear his lecture, Plato proceeded as usual, saying that “so long as he had Aristotle for an audience, he had the better half of Athens.” His industry was proverbial; he grudged the time needed for repose, and used to sleep with a ball in his hand, that when it fell from his grasp by the relaxing of the muscles the noise would awaken him.

When Plato died, Aristotle retired from the Academy; and in 342 B.C. he received the following letter from Philip of Macedon, whose court he had visited as an ambassador:—

There was no declining such an invitation. At Stagira, his[Pg 248] native town, Philip provided a school and the accustomed grove for instruction, in which the philosopher moulded the mind of Alexander the future Conqueror. The king of Macedon was more than satisfied with the results; and the royal pupil owned his indebtedness to his teacher, exclaiming, “Philip only gave me life, but Aristotle has taught me the art of living well!”

When, on the assassination of Philip, Alexander mounted the throne and embarked on that expedition which extended the sway of Macedon over half the known world, he showed his gratitude by making his instructor a munificent present equivalent to nearly $1,000,000, and employed two or three thousand men to fill his cabinets with specimens. Thus supplied with material and funds, Aristotle, established in Athens since 335 B.C. as a distinguished teacher despite his traditional lisp and insignificant appearance, vigorously prosecuted his scientific labors. At the Lyce’um, Apollo’s temple, he gave instruction to his disciples, walking up and down in the covered paths (peripatoi) about the building—whence the name of his school, Peripatetic. He mastered all existing knowledge, regarding learning as “an ornament to men in prosperity, a refuge in adversity;” and for thirteen years divided his time between his pupils and his literary work.

The news of Alexander’s sudden death was the signal for Aristotle’s enemies, no longer restrained by fear of his royal friend, to show their hand. Impiety was alleged against him; but mindful of the fate of Socrates, and, as he said, to prevent the Athenians from sinning a second time against philosophy, he retired to Chalcis on the island of Eubœa, where he died within a year.

Philosophy and Writing of Aristotle.—While to some extent following his master, from several of Plato’s doctrines Aristotle felt compelled to dissent; truth, he said,[Pg 249] was dearer to him than any friend.[35] He did not accept the Ideal theory, but inclined to materialism or to pantheism, making reason divine and omnipresent. He doubted his own immortality, holding that the soul could not exist apart from the body, and that there is “nothing good or bad beyond to the dead.” His style was dry, elliptical, and full of technicalities; if we compare it with Plato’s, we have the opposite poles of the magnet.

Plato was all imagination, Aristotle was thoroughly practical. The inspiration of the one was a passionate love of wisdom; the forte of the other was power of analysis, a wonderful faculty of systemizing knowledge. The master captivated the heart; the pupil convinced the reason. “The philosophy of Plato,” says Dr. Draper, “is a gorgeous castle in the air; that of Aristotle is a solid structure laboriously founded on rock.”

Aristotle’s style is devoid of ornament, and his subjects are too abstruse for the general run of readers; but he was a keen observer and a close reasoner. A few paragraphs from his Rhetoric, in which he analyzes the peculiarities of old age, will show how well he understood human nature.

THE DISPOSITION OF THE OLD.

The writings of Aristotle exhausted the fields of art and science; 400 treatises, most of which have perished, at one time bore his name. Rhetoric, psychology or mental sci[Pg 251]ence, and natural history, owed to him their origin. In his “Organon” was first presented the method of deduction,—the process by which the mind reasons down from general propositions to particular cases, by means of the syllogism, the organ or instrument of reasoning. Men had thus arrived at conclusions for ages, without any knowledge of Aristotle’s formulæ, just as they had talked correctly though ignorant of analytical grammar. It was reserved for the Stagirite to discover the laws by which they drew conclusions, and thus at once to found and perfect Logic. This was the science of reasoning, as contrasted with Plato’s dialectics or method of discussing. (See Benn’s “The Greek Philosophers.”)

Nor was Aristotle unacquainted with Induction, the great lever of modern philosophy. This process, which reverses the steps of deduction,[36] and reasons from particular cases up to general laws, was employed in his researches, but was not fully developed till twenty centuries later in the “Novum Organon” of Lord Bacon, opening the way to a new era in scientific investigation.

Aristotle willed his writings to his disciple Theophrastus, whom we shall next consider; and for many years they were kept from the world, while numerous imitations and forgeries gained the popular ear through the prestige of Aristotle’s name. It was not till 50 B.C. that a complete edition of the genuine works was published, and then at Rome. Meanwhile the Lyceum had waned; its later heads were men of mediocre ability,[Pg 252] and the Peripatetic School was superseded in popular estimation by the Epicurean and the Stoic.

Theophrastus, of Lesbos (374-287 B.C.), a pupil of Plato and afterward of Aristotle, succeeded the latter, by his appointment, as head of the Lyceum. During his time, he maintained the high reputation of the school, attracting many to it from all parts of Greece by his eloquence. That he might address a still larger audience, he wrote numerous treatises on philosophy and natural history.

His “Moral Characters,” which have descended to us, show up in lively colors such representative personages as the Gabbler, the Niggard, the Noodle, the Grumbler, the Swell, the Poltroon, the Slanderer, the Newsmonger, the Clown, etc., from whom, it seems, that Greek society was not exempt any more than our own. These were the first character-sketches ever made; they served as models to La Bruyère in French, to Sir Thomas Overbury and others in English literature. As specimens, we cull the most pointed portions of the sections on the Flatterer and the Unseasonable Man.

THE FLATTERER.

MR. MALAPROP.

The Stoic School was so called from the Painted Portico (stoa) at Athens, where its founder Zeno, the Cyprian, taught for fifty-eight years (318-260 B.C.). It was based on high moral principles, but was not free from errors. Duty was all in this philosophy; virtue alone, happiness. Mastery of self, contempt alike for pleasure and pain, were leading doctrines.

Fate governed the world, even God himself. Yet Zeno did not allow this doctrine to excuse shortcomings or interfere[Pg 254] with individual responsibility. When his slave, detected in theft, besought exemption from chastisement on the plea that it was fated for him to steal, he replied, “Yes, and it was also fated for you to be flogged.”

Suicide, in Zeno’s creed, was justifiable when a man had outlived his usefulness, and the great philosopher practised as he preached; for, having received a severe fall at the age of ninety-eight, he quietly remarked, “I obey the summons,” and went and hanged himself.

Zeno enjoyed public confidence at home as well as the respect of foreign princes; among his disciples were enrolled some of the greatest men of Greece and Rome. Nothing remains of his writings.

The Cynics derived their name from the gymnasium of Cynosarges, near the Lyceum, where they gathered to listen to Antisthenes, a pupil of Socrates. This extremist perverted his master’s theory of virtue, which he made to consist in a comfortless life, a renunciation of pleasure, and a contemptuous and even shameless independence of manners. Yet Socrates saw pride even through the holes of Antisthenes’ shabby robe.

Antisthenes was not much in metaphysics. He was puzzled by abstract generalizations, and to Plato’s Idealism opposed an uncompromising Realism. “Plato,” he said, “I can see a horse, and I can see a man, but horsehood and manhood I cannot see.”—“True,” replied Plato, “you have the eye that can see a horse and a man; but the eye which can see horsehood and manhood you lack.”

Of the many works of this first Cynic philosopher, scarcely anything is left. They were probably steeped in gall, for his powers of sarcasm were unsurpassed; he dealt trenchant blows at what he considered folly, wherever he found it. He ridiculed the want of judgment displayed at Athens in the selection of generals, by counselling the Athenians to vote their asses horses. “That is absurd,” was the reply. “No[Pg 255] more so,” he retorted, “than to think you have made ignoramuses generals, by simply lifting up the hand. “Once when annoyed at a speaker’s dilating on the joys of the future state, he abruptly demanded, “Why don’t you die, then?”

His successor, Diogenes, carried out the rôle. Soured by the disgraceful failure of his father, he turned to the ascetic philosophy of the Cynics, and took a morbid pleasure in outraging society by his infringements on decency. His satirical remarks, which cut to the quick, earned him the title of “the Dog” by way of eminence. He slept wherever he happened to be, on stoops or in a tub; and eschewing artificial wants, he felt so rebuked when he saw a boy drinking through his hands and receiving his pottage in a hollowed loaf, that he threw away his cup and platter.

Into such snarling, insolent, and offensive misanthropes did the Cynics degenerate, that the name of their sect was popularly traced to the dogs (in Greek cynes) they so much resembled.—To this complexion did the noble philosophy of Socrates come at last.

ORATORY.

Political Eloquence, like the drama, history, and philosophy, attained perfection in the golden age. Public speaking was a natural accomplishment of the Greeks; and from the days of Homer down, soldiers, legislators, and statesmen, had been distinguished as orators. In Pericles, who made eloquence a study, we are introduced to one of the world’s most polished speakers. (Consult Jebb’s “Attic Orators.”)

But the cultivation of rhetoric and oratory as an art was first popularized by Gorgias of Leonti´ni (see Map, p. 304), who about 427 B.C. transplanted it from Sicily and saw it flourish in Athenian soil as it had never flourished before. Gorgias founded a school of eloquence at Athens, which was thronged by the great men of the time, eager to acquire the persuasive arts of the Sicilian teacher. Thus rhetoric became a fashion[Pg 256]able accomplishment; and to such account was it turned by the taste and genius of the Attic Greeks that they soon produced the greatest orators of history.

Among these was the graceful and elegant Lysias (lish’e-ăs—458-378 B.C.), compared by Quintilian to a pure fountain rather than a great river; and Isæus, the leading barrister of Athens and preceptor of Demosthenes. Greater than either as a teacher and writer of orations for others, though through timidity he rarely appeared in public himself, was Isocrates, founder of a school from which Cicero said, “as from the Trojan horse, princes only proceeded;” to use his own figure, he was a whetstone which imparted the power of cutting to other things, but cut not itself. Finally, to this category belonged the great rivals Æschines and Demosthenes, foremost of the Attic orators.

Demosthenes (384-322 B.C.—it is worth remembering that his dates are identical with Aristotle’s) stands alone in the power of his eloquence. Born in Attica, he was left fatherless at the age of seven, but inherited a large fortune. The bulk of this his guardians made away with; although they engaged the best talent in the land to superintend the education of their ward. When Demosthenes arrived at his majority, he brought suit against them, and wrote his maiden speeches with such skill as to obtain a judgment in his favor.

The study of oratory now became the passion of his life. By indomitable perseverance he overcame what to many would have proved insuperable difficulties—shortness of breath, a sickly constitution, a weak and stammering utterance, and awkwardness in gesticulating. He practised on the sea-shore till his voice rose clear and full above the breakers; he placed pebbles in his mouth while declaiming to correct his articulation, and improved his breathing by running up steep hills. A friendly mirror helped him to make his gestures effective; and he spent months at a time in a room underground, occu[Pg 257]pied in study, or in copying the history of Thucydides to strengthen his style. Thus, in spite of every natural disadvantage, he placed himself by his own efforts “at the head of all mighty masters of speech.” He lived to receive the homage, not only of those Athenians who had hissed the early performances of “the stammerer,” but of crowds gathered from all quarters of Greece.

Conciseness, precision, clearness, compact reasoning, power of invective, and vehemence compared to that of a torrent carrying everything before it, were characteristic of the orations of Demosthenes. Sixty-one of these (probably not all genuine) are still extant, the most famous being the twelve “Philippics,” delivered against Philip of Macedon, who was insidiously plotting the subversion of Grecian liberty. Demosthenes penetrated his designs, disdained his bribes, and for fourteen years struggled nobly against him. His impassioned utterances at last roused the slumbering patriotism of his countrymen, and, joined by the Thebans, they met Philip at Chæronea—but only to be hopelessly defeated. The fate of Greece was sealed. Demosthenes fled from the field and escaped to Athens, where he delivered the funeral eulogy on the slain.

The success of Philip strengthened the Macedonian sympathizers in Athens, at the head of whom was the orator Æschines, accused by Demosthenes of being in the pay of Macedon. When, therefore, Ctesiphon proposed that the services of Demosthenes be rewarded with a golden crown, Æschines opposed the measure. After a delay of six years, during which we may be sure both orators strained every nerve to prepare for the decisive struggle, the final contest took place before a vast and excited concourse. The fiery vigor of Demosthenes, in the most splendid effort of ancient eloquence, swept away like feathers the arguments, the wit, the sarcasm, of his opponent; Æschines was utterly discomfited.

[Pg 258]

The elaborate speech “On the Crown” is the masterpiece of Demosthenes; we give parts of the peroration.

FROM DEMOSTHENES’ ORATION ON THE CROWN.

[Pg 260]

Twice after the reverse of Chæronea Demosthenes succeeded in arraying his country against Macedon—at the assassination of Philip and on the death of Alexander. When news of Alexander’s decease reached Greece, the orator was in exile, having been unjustly convicted of taking Macedonian treasure; yet he did his utmost to arm the Grecian cities, and was in consequence recalled to Athens by the fickle people. But it was all in vain.

At last, marked for destruction by the Macedonian regent Antip’ater, and doomed to death by his cowardly fellow-citizens whose necks were now under the tyrant’s heel, he fled to the temple of Neptune on Calaure’a and there found relief from his troubles in a quill of poison which he kept ready for an emergency. In Demosthenes, Athens lost an incorruptible patriot—antiquity, one of her noblest characters. The Athenians erected to his memory a brazen statue on which was inscribed:—

Æschines (389-314 B.C.), of whose early life little is known, after his defeat at the hands of Demosthenes, went into exile. We are told that his victorious rival magnanimously forgave him, and even offered him money for the journey; which led Æschines to exclaim: “How I regret leaving a country where I have found an enemy so generous that I must despair of ever meeting with a friend who shall be like him!”

Æschines afterward established himself as a teacher of oratory in Rhodes. Here he once repeated to his pupils his famous oration against Ctesiphon in the contest for the crown, which filled them with wonder that so able an orator should have been defeated. But when at their request he read the reply of Demosthenes, his audience rose to their feet with eager acclamations; and the orator, forgetting all jealousy in[Pg 261] his admiration, cried: “What would you have said, had you heard the wild beast himself roaring it out?”

The oration against Ctesiphon is one of three familiarly known in antiquity as “the Three Graces”—a title indicative of the refinement and easy flow of the author’s style, deficient as it was in the energy and vehemence of his great rival.

MINOR DRAMATIC AND LYRIC POETS.

NOTES ON GREEK EDUCATION, ETC.

Decline of Letters.—The triumph of the Doric states over Athens in the Peloponnesian War (431-404 B.C.) gave the first blow to the intellectual power of Greece. Literary decay forthwith set in; its progress was hastened by internal dissensions, and completed when liberty was hopelessly extinguished by Philip of Macedon and his successors.

Alexander indeed benefited the East by introducing the Greek language and culture, and building magnificent cities in return for her hordes of barbarians slain; but his policy[Pg 263] left out of view the interests of Greece. While Athens remained the seminary of Europe for several centuries after his death, Alexandria, founded by him at the mouth of the Nile, became the intellectual as well as commercial capital of the world. From this city, the period we are about to consider derives its name. It extends from the death of Alexander the Great (323 B.C.) to the conquest of Egypt by the Romans (30 B.C.).

The Alexandrian Age produced no grand masterpieces. No glorious struggle for freedom inspired the historian; there was no further need for the efforts of the orator; science and criticism flourished instead of poetry; and a host of imitators usurped the place of the mighty originals of the olden time. The national taste had sadly deteriorated; an affected obscurity was fashionable; and gaudy tinsel was more highly valued than true gold.

Yet one bright bloom gladdened this waste—Idyllic Poetry, which expanded into a perfect flower in the hands of Theoc’ritus the Sicilian. A new school of comedy was also established by Menander and Phile’mon; and many seeds of Greek genius that Alexander had scattered broadcast over the earth sprung up on foreign soil, and yielded fruit—but fruit inferior to that ripened under its native sun.

DRAMATIC POETRY.

The New Comedy dealt with the follies and vices of society at large, not with individuals, the actor no longer venturing, since the downfall of political liberty, to imitate Aristophanes in representing living characters. Its simple plot was generally based on some love-intrigue. Though the broad fun of the Old Comedy was wanting, quiet humor contrasted happily with pathos, the grave with the gay; the audience, provoked by turns to laughter and to tears, were all the time learning some useful principle or moral lesson. Cicero styled[Pg 264] the New Comedy “the mirror of real life.”—The chorus now ceased to take part in the representation, and the play was divided into acts separated by intervals of time.

Of the sixty-four poets associated by the ancients with the New Comedy, the greatest were Menander and Philemon, both citizens of Athens, though Philemon was foreign-born. Not until both had passed from the stage of life was the meed of superior excellence awarded to Menander.

Menander (341-291 B.C.) dramatized love-stories for the young with elegance and dignity; while the undercurrent of wisdom that flowed through his plays recommended them to the old. Out of a hundred comedies of which he was the author, only a few fragments are left; but these Goethe pronounced “invaluable.” So perfectly did he delineate character that Aristophanes, the grammarian, asked whether Menander copied life, or life Menander.

His talent early displayed itself, securing him a crown while he was yet a mere youth, but subjecting him to the displeasure of his defeated rivals, who accused him of presumption in vying with experienced poets. Menander replied to the charge by appearing on the stage with an armful of new-born puppies, which he cast into a tub of water. Bidding the audience mark how they swam, he exclaimed: “You ask me, Athenians, how at my years I can have the knowledge of life required in the dramatist; I ask you under what master and in what school these creatures learned to swim?”

Despite his superior merit, however, Menander obtained the dramatic prize but eight times, owing to the greater influence of his rival Philemon with the masses. It is stated that this injustice at length led the poet to drown himself. His plays long served as models to the comic stage. The Romans, Plautus and Terence, helped themselves freely from his treasury, and through their dramas our modern comedy may be traced back to Menander himself.

[Pg 265]

FRAGMENTS FROM MENANDER.

Philemon exhibited the first of his ninety-seven comedies when Menander was a boy of eleven. Nine years later Menander’s first piece appeared, and the rivalry between the poets began. In their subsequent contests, Philemon sometimes stooped to unworthy means to defeat his opponent; still, that his countrymen really admired him is evident from the legend current of his death. As he was concluding a comedy in his ninety-ninth year, nine beautiful maidens were said to have entered his chamber and beckoned him away. They were the Muses, about to wing their flight from Athens forever, and with them departed the soul of Philemon—the last of the Athenian poets.

FRAGMENTS FROM PHILEMON.

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PASTORAL POETRY.

Theocritus (flourished 283-263 B.C.).—The pastoral, or bucolic, poetry of the Greeks, which originated in the rude songs of Laconian and Sicilian shepherds, was matured and elevated into a new department of polite composition in the idyls of Theocritus. Born in Sicily, as he tells us in an epigram intended to preface his works, he was tempted to the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus. Here his refreshing pictures of rural scenery were the delight of the Alexandrians, shut in by the walls of their city from the beauties of nature. Theocritus eventually returned to Sicily, and ended his days amid his native fields. (Symonds’s “Studies of the Greek Poets,” p. 302.)

The poetry of Theocritus exhibits originality and refinement, the Doric dialect in which he wrote lending the charm of picturesqueness to his descriptions. Pope commends him for simplicity and truthfulness to nature; Dryden, for “the inimitable tenderness of his passions” and the skill with which he disguised his art. As a delineator of natural scenery, he has no superior among ancient or modern poets.—There are extant thirty idyls and twenty-two epigrams of this poet. We present below Idyl VIII.

THE TRIUMPH OF DAPHNIS.

Bion of Smyrna, a contemporary of Theocritus, emigrated to Sicily for the purpose of studying pastoral poetry in its native haunts. What little we know respecting his life is gathered from the elegy written by his pupil, the delicate and graceful Moschus, a bucolic poet of Syracuse ranked with Theocritus and Bion, but inferior to both. “The Lament for Bion” intimates that he died from the effects of poison, administered perhaps by jealous rivals.

Bion’s love-songs and pastorals are characterized by sweetness and finish; they are less life-like, however, than those of Theocritus. The “Lament for Adonis" is the poet’s best[Pg 270] effort; but as it is uninteresting to the general reader, we give a free paraphrase of

THE BIRD-CATCHER AND LOVE.

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LINES TO HESPER.

FROM MOSCHUS’S LAMENT FOR BION.

The Museum.—While the Muses who fled with the spirit of Philemon were never induced to return to Hellas, in the East the Greek mind, stimulated by the architectural wonders, the new religious systems, the proficiency in many departments of knowledge, which it encountered, entered upon a new phase of development. Alexandria witnessed its proudest achievements in science.

This city was embellished with temples and palaces, with parks, fountains, and monuments, until it eclipsed in beauty all others of its time. Our interest, however, centres in its marble Muse’um, or Temple of the Muses, begun by the first Ptolemy and finished by his son Philadelphus, which sent forth the greatest scientists of antiquity. In its halls, those hungering for knowledge were more than satisfied; up and down its corridors the professors walked as they gave instruction; while its botanical and zoölogical gardens afforded opportunities for delightful relaxation. An observatory and the best astronomical instruments of the day invited to the study of the heavens, and a dissecting-room was at the disposal of the anatomist. Chemical investigations were facilitated by a laboratory, where thus early the science of alchemy was born, and Philadelphus himself eagerly experimented in search of the elixir of life. To this brilliant centre of letters, the first university in the world, learned men were attracted from all quarters. At one time, 14,000 students were under instruction.

The Alexandrian Library.—The Museum was the seat of a[Pg 273] great library, collected in accordance with Ptolemy’s command that all the writings of the earth should be brought to Egypt to be transcribed. But once there, the originals seldom parted company with the pictures and statues in Ptolemy’s sculptured alcoves, the owners being obliged to content themselves with fac-similes of their treasured rolls made by the royal copyists. The Egyptian kings often paid roundly for valuable manuscripts. It is stated that Philadelphus borrowed at Athens the plays of Euripides to have them copied for his library, depositing about $10,000 as security for their return. But when the work was done, he sent back the transcript, preferring to lose his money rather than part with the originals.

Greeks of the Alexandrian Period.

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Philadelphus left 100,000 volumes in the library. These quadrupled after his death, and filled the Museum to overflowing, so that in the Temple of Sera’pis was opened “the Daughter Library” for the reception of additional volumes. The number of these ultimately reached 300,000, making 700,000 in all.

When, after the assassination of Pompey, Cæsar fired Alexandria (47 B.C.), the flames enwrapped the Museum, and its library perished. Antony subsequently gave Cleopatra the Pergamene Collection of parchment books (see p. 24), which, with his kingdom, Attalus III. had bequeathed to the Romans (133 B.C.). This, added to the rolls in the Temple of Serapis, formed at once an extensive library. It was increased by constant additions, but in the end served as fuel for the four thousand baths of the city, when Alexandria fell before the Mohammedan arms (640 A.D.), and the bigoted caliph decided that “if the Greek writings agreed with the Koran, they were useless and need not be preserved; if they disagreed, they were pernicious and ought to be destroyed.”

POETRY AT ALEXANDRIA.

The first school of poetry at Alexandria was founded by Phile’tas (330-285 B.C.), the elegiac writer, so dwarfish and emaciated that the jesters of his time declared he had to wear leaden shoes to keep the wind from blowing him away. Philetas was the instructor of Theocritus. But the greatest names associated with the Museum are those of Callim’achus and Apollonius Rhodius.

Callimachus (250 B.C.) shines not only as a lyric and epic poet, but also as a critic and grammarian. From the position of a suburban schoolmaster he rose to that of librarian at the Museum, and made himself “the literary dictator and universal genius of his age.”

Callimachus exercised his talents in all the departments of[Pg 275] poetry, and wrote as well in prose. His works reached the number of 800; which is not to be wondered at when we remember his remark, “A great book is a great evil.” Such of his hymns and epigrams as time has spared, bear the marks of study rather than genius.

Apollonius, called Rhodius from his long residence in Rhodes, was born at Alexandria, and studied under Callimachus. But the master grew jealous of his pupil, and a quarrel arose between them. When, at the instigation of Callimachus, his epic poem on the Argonautic Expedition was unfavorably received by the Alexandrians, Apollonius, in his mortification, left the city and opened a school of rhetoric in Rhodes. Here he revised his poem, and became justly renowned for his brilliant attainments. After the death of Callimachus, he was recalled to Alexandria, read his epic a second time to the people, and had the satisfaction of receiving their warmest commendations with the honorable office of librarian (194 B.C.).

The “Argonautica,” in four books, is all that is left of his works. We take from it the passage which describes the impression made on Medea by Jason, the leader of the expedition; compare the history of Medea as sketched in connection with the play of Euripides bearing her name, page 210.

MEDEA IN LOVE.

PROSE WRITERS.

Science.—The influence of the Alexandrian university in shaping modern science was all-potential. Among its ornaments are numbered the mathematicians Euclid and Archime’des, the astronomer Eratos’thenes, Hero the inventor of a steam-engine, and Ctesibius who devised water-clocks, pumps, and other ingenious machines.

Euclid (300 B.C.) compressed in one volume all the geometrical knowledge extant, adding several original theorems. His “Elements” has been translated into many languages, and though it has attained the venerable age of 2,200 years, its clear demonstrations are still standards in our schools.

Archimedes was educated in Alexandria, but afterward lived in Syracuse, where his mathematical genius challenged the admiration of the world. In geometry and mechanics he was the master-mind of antiquity; and until the star of Newton rose twenty centuries after, Europe saw not his equal.[Pg 277] Many important discoveries in physical science are due to Archimedes,—the principle of the lever, which led him to exclaim, “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the world;” the process of finding the specific gravity of bodies; the hydraulic screw and the pulley. Of his many mathematical works, written in Doric Greek, eight survive.

Eratosthenes (276-196 B.C.) was the founder of geodesy and chronology, as well as a proficient in astronomy, grammar, and poetry. The ancients styled him Pentathlos (quintuple athlete); also, from his determining the magnitude of the earth, “Measurer of the Universe.” His most important works are “Chronographies,” and geographical and mathematical writings.

Hipparchus (150 B.C.), an astronomer of the Alexandrian age, deserves mention as the inventor of the planisphere and as the first to make a catalogue of the stars. He devised the method of locating places by latitude and longitude.

Grammar.—The Museum was especially eminent as a school of grammar and criticism, the principal occupation of its scholars being the revision and correction of the texts of the old authors.

The most distinguished of the Alexandrian critics were—Zenod’otus, the first librarian and critical editor of Homer’s epics; Aristophanes of Byzantium, his pupil (200 B.C.), the inventor of Greek accents and punctuation; Aristarchus (156 B.C.), “the arch-grammarian of Greece,” who divided Homer’s poems into books, revised the Alexandrian canon, and was the author of 800 commentaries; and Cra’tes, head of a grammatical school at Pergamus, and the first to make grammar a popular study at Rome.

History.—Polybius (204-122 B.C.) was the chief historian of the Alexandrian age. Brought to Rome a prisoner after the battle of Pydna (168 B.C.), in which the king of Macedon was overthrown by Paulus Æmilius, he became the intimate[Pg 278] friend of Scipio Africanus the Younger. Seventeen years elapsed before Polybius was permitted to return to Greece. Then he went back the firm friend of the Romans; and had his countrymen heeded his counsels, the sack of Corinth might have been averted and Greece might have preserved her independence. So, at least, declared the inscription on his statue: “Hellas would have been saved had she followed the advice of Polybius.”

Polybius accompanied Scipio in several of his campaigns, and saw Carthage burned to the ground. In his travels, which were varied and extensive, he stored his mind with useful information for his “Universal History,” the grand work of his life. Its forty books impartially narrated the history of Rome and the contemporary nations between the years 220 and 146 B.C., but in a style devoid of attractions. Polybius, as Macaulay said, lacked “the art of telling a story in an interesting manner.” The first five books of his work, and a few fragments of the others, have been preserved.

As all eyes have recently been turned on Constantinople, whose important situation has long made its acquisition the traditional policy of Russia, it may not be uninteresting to present the view which Polybius takes of this ancient city, then known as

BYZANTIUM.

Man´etho in Egypt, Bero´sus at Babylon, and Timæus in Sicily, wrote the annals of their several countries.

The Septuagint.—Finally, to the Museum we owe the Septuagint (p. 104), or Greek version of the Old Testament, made by learned Jews employed by Ptolemy. The Jews no longer spoke the ancient Hebrew with fluency, and their version in various parts betrays an imperfect knowledge of the original. The Septuagint served as a basis for translations into many different tongues.

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THE SEVEN PLEIADES.

• Theocritus: the idyl-writer.
• Callimachus: poet, grammarian, etc.
• Lyc’ophron, the Obscure: author of “Cassandra,” “the dark poem,” and 64 tragedies.
• Apollonius Rhodius.
• Homer the Younger.
• Ara’tus: author of a popular astronomical poem; from him St. Paul quoted the expression with reference to the Deity, “in whom we live, and move, and have our being.”
• Nicander, a physician: two didactic medical poems on poisons and their antidotes.

Eupho’rion, author of three heroic poems and a celebrated grammar—Apollodorus, the didactic poet—and Melea’ger the Exquisite, flourished in the Alexandrian age. Meleager’s “Garland” was the first anthology, or collection of epigrams. An’yte of Arcadia, “the female Homer,” and Nossis, the Locrian poetess (300 B.C.), wrote epigrams. Cleanthes, the persevering disciple of Zeno (300-220 B.C.), composed moral treatises and a hymn to Jupiter full of lofty sentiments.

Extinction of Greek Genius.—The long period which now engages our attention is marked by a further decline, and the ultimate extinction of letters. Roman despotism was inimical to literature; Greece lay prostrate and broken-spirited; night was fast settling down on the world. Poetry, a faint shadow of its former self, appeared principally in epigrams. The prose of the early Christian centuries exhibits some exceptional gleams, but they are only the flickerings of a dying flame.

About the Christian Era is gathered a group of geographical and historical writers with Stra’bo, Diodo’rus Sic’ulus, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus as the prominent figures.[Pg 281] The first century after Christ presents to us the authors of the New Testament; Clement of Rome, an eminent authority with the early Christians; and Josephus, the Jewish historian, all of whom wrote in Greek. Plutarch, the eminent biographer, born about 50 A.D., lived through the first twenty years of the second century, which was also adorned with the names of Lucian and Pausanias the geographer. In the third century flourished Longi’nus, the greatest rhetorician of this later age; while the writings of the Christian fathers extend over a period of several hundred years, from the time of Clement just named.

After the fall of Rome (476 A.D.), Constantinople became the sole centre of letters, and there for nearly a thousand years they languished. After Mahomet II. carried the city by storm in 1453, the native scholars dispersed over Europe, and by awakening an interest in classical studies contributed not a little to the revival of letters.

THE FIRST CENTURY BEFORE CHRIST.

Diodorus Siculus (the Sicilian) was the author of “the Historical Library,” which cost him thirty years of labor. Unfolding the story of the human race from remote antiquity to the time of Julius Cæsar, his work contains much valuable information.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus.—The longest production of this writer is his “Roman Antiquities,” a history of Rome prior to the Punic wars, pervaded by an evident partiality for Greece and her institutions. Dionysius was also a rhetorician of the highest rank, as his critical essays on the eloquence of Demosthenes, the style of Thucydides, and other subjects, testify.

Strabo, of Pontus in Asia Minor, must be remembered in connection with his “Geography,” still extant, an interesting work in seventeen books, for which he prepared himself by[Pg 282] travels in Asia, Africa, and Europe. It is not a mere tissue of names and statistics, but is lighted up with sketches of social life, pleasant stories, and epitomes of political history, thus entertaining at the same time that it instructs.

What this lively writer records of India may interest the reader:—

THE WONDERS OF INDIA.

THE FIRST THREE CHRISTIAN CENTURIES.

Josephus, born A.D. 37 at Jerusalem, was the scion of a noble line. At the early age of fourteen he astonished the chief priests by his mental power and familiarity with the intricacies of Jewish law. We next hear of him as spending three years in the desert with a hermit, and then as joining the Pharisees.

The revolutionary tendencies of his countrymen brought on a war with the Romans, in the course of which Josephus, after the brave defence of a city under his command, was made prisoner by the Roman general Flavius Vespasian. Prophesying that Vespasian would one day wear the purple of the emperors, he alone of the captives was spared; the fulfilment of this prediction about three years later insured him the favor of the Flavian family, whose name he prefixed to his own. Vespasian’s son, Titus, he accompanied to the siege of Jerusalem, receiving at the hands of the victorious general after its capture the lives of two hundred and forty of his friends, together with the sacred volumes which he greatly prized.

From the desolation of his country, Josephus returned to Rome as the honored guest of the emperor and his sons, during whose reigns he produced his great works,—“the History of the Jewish War” and “Jewish Antiquities.” These interesting standards, though written in a style which has led to their author’s being called “the Grecian Livy,” are yet tinged with vanity and skepticism.

Plutarch (50-120 A.D.), the great biographer of antiquity, was born in Chæronea, a Bœotian town. After completing his education at Athens, he sailed to Egypt, and in Domitian’s[Pg 285] reign (81-96 A.D.) visited Rome, where his lectures won golden opinions from the learned.

From Italy, Plutarch returned to his native city, and there passed the last twenty or thirty years of his life, happy in the society of his wife, a paragon of good sense, economy, and virtue. Literature was henceforth his pursuit; but believing it a duty to devote part of his time to the public good, he accepted office from his fellow-townsmen, and was finally made chief-magistrate of Chæronea. He tells us with relish how his neighbors often laughed at his doing what they considered beneath his dignity. When they wondered that so great a man should carry fish from market in his own hands, he told them, “Why, it’s for myself;” and when they found fault with him for personally superintending the building of public edifices, he silenced them with the reply, “This service is not for myself, but for my country.” “The meaner the office you sustain,” said Plutarch, “the greater the compliment you pay to the public.”

In his delightful retreat at Chæronea, Plutarch compiled from two hundred and fifty authorities the work that has given him a niche in the Temple of Fame—“Parallel Lives”—sparkling with interest and animation, as it is underlaid by good judgment. His plan was to present the biography of a distinguished Greek, follow it with that of some Roman, and then critically compare the two characters. But the “Lives,” as we have it, is not the complete work its author probably left at his death, inasmuch as a number of biographies and parallels are wanting. Though Plutarch’s passion for story-telling sometimes carries him beyond the bounds of the probable, yet his work is an invaluable storehouse; his capital literary portraits have stood the test of time, and are still universally admired. The charms of a book in which are recorded “the greatest characters and most admirable actions of the human race” can never fade.

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Among the best of Plutarch’s Parallels is his

COMPARISON OF DEMOSTHENES AND CICERO.

A moralist as well as a biographer, Plutarch wrote many ethical and philosophical essays. The death of his daughter called forth a feeling letter to his wife,—“the Consolation,”—in which he affectionately bids her not give way to extravagant grief, but submit with resignation to the blow, comforting her with thoughts of immortality; it may be added that he held Plato’s views on this subject as on others.

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In his “Essay on Inquisitiveness” he condemns all eagerness to learn news and impatience in opening letters, or “biting the strings in two, as many will if they do not succeed at once with their fingers.” As an example of dignified patience, he instances Rusticus at Rome, who in the midst of a lecture received a letter from the emperor Domitian, but would not open it till Plutarch had finished speaking.

Lucian (probably 120-200 A.D.); one of the wittiest of Greek writers, was a native of Syria, and passed his boyhood on the banks of the Euphrates. Doubtless his favorite amusement of moulding wax into figures weighed with his parents, no less than their own poverty, when they bound him as an apprentice to his mother’s brother to learn the sculptor’s art. The young Lucian enthusiastically fell in with their decision, fondly anticipating the time when he should astonish his playfellows with little gods cut from the marble by his own hands. But his maiden attempt in the statuary’s shop resulted in a broken slab and a cruel whipping at the hands of his uncle. “The first wages I earned,” he said, “were tears”—but they were also the last. He never returned to the chisel and mallet.

After picking up a rhetorical education, by what means he does not tell us, Lucian established himself at Antioch as a lawyer; but failing of success, he set out on a lecture tour through Europe. In Gaul, where rhetoric, the art he taught, was in special demand, he accumulated a fortune; with which he retired from his profession in the prime of life, and took up his residence at Athens. Here he prosecuted his literary studies, exchanged his Syrian Greek for pure Attic, and is believed to have written his finest Dialogues.

At the age of seventy, Lucian found himself so reduced as to be obliged to accept from the Roman emperor the clerkship of the Alexandrian courts. This position, which allowed[Pg 289] him to continue his literary labors, he is said to have enjoyed until his death.

Lucian’s Style and Writings.—Piquant humor, inimitable power of satire, and wonderful versatility, are Lucian’s strong points. His style is clear and graceful. Of his voluminous writings the most popular are the “Dialogues” on various subjects, serious and humorous. He attacked falsehood and trickery, folly and superstition; and the deadly blows he rained upon his country’s mythology, which led to his being called “the Blasphemer,” indirectly, though unintentionally, helped the spread of Christianity.

In the “Dialogues of the Gods,” the deities talk over the domestic affairs of the Olympian household, gossip, and wrangle, and pry into one another’s secrets, quite after the manner of humans. Such a belittling of the national divinities could not be without an unsettling effect on the popular faith.—The “Dialogues of the Dead” are equally rich with humor and ridicule.

Against the philosophers of his day, whom he looked upon as miserable charlatans, Lucian launched the laughable Dialogue entitled “the Sale of the Philosophers,” in which the founders of the old schools are disposed of at auction by Jupiter in a slave-market, Mercury playing the part of auctioneer. Pythagoras is put up first and sells for $175; Diogenes, the next, brings less than sixpence; while Socrates commands the high price of two talents. Pyrrho, the universal doubter, will not believe that he has been sold, even after he has seen himself paid for and delivered. The laughing Democritus and weeping Heraclitus fail to find a purchaser. The attempted sale of these two philosophers is thus depicted:—

“The Sale of the Philosophers” has a sequel in “the Re[Pg 291]suscitated Professors.” Permitted to return to earth for a day to revenge themselves on Lucian, the Philosophers capture him, and bring him to trial before the goddess of philosophy. He clears himself by showing that he has not attacked the venerable sages themselves, but only the impostors who cheat the world under their great names. In the beginning of the Dialogue, Lucian is thus assailed by the belligerent Socrates and his confrères:—

Lucian is also famous in another line. His “True History,” a burlesque on the Munchausen stories of the old poets and historians, recounts the stirring adventures of a party of voyagers who sail westward from the Pillars of Hercules[Pg 292] (Strait of Gibraltar). It describes their visit to the moon, their sojourn in a country where wine flowed in rivers, their twenty months’ experience inside of a sea-monster that swallowed their vessel, and their discovery of “the Island of the Blest,” with its golden-paved city and vines loaded with monthly fruitage. The lunarians happened to be engaged in war with the people of the sun, at the time of Lucian’s arrival, and he had the good fortune to witness a grand review of the lunar army. There were cavalry mounted on lettuce-winged birds, darters of millet-seed, garlic-fighters, wind-coursers, and archers who rode elephantine fleas. Spiders as large as islands hovered on their flanks. On the side of the sun were mustered horse-ants that covered two acres, archers on colossal gnats, slingers who discharged fetid radishes, and dog-headed men astride of winged acorns.—Had novel-writing been in vogue in Lucian’s time, he would no doubt have excelled in that department of fiction.

Pausanias, the Lydian geographer, was a contemporary of Lucian’s. It has been said that “no writer of antiquity except Herodotus has stored away so many valuable facts in a small volume” as he in his “Itinerary of Greece.” Pausanias made art items a special feature of his Itinerary.

Other Writers of the Second Century.—In the second century, Claudius Ptolemy, the astronomer, put forth his theory of the universe: that the earth is stationary and the centre of eight huge, hollow, crystal spheres, placed one within another. The moon he located in the nearest sphere, Mercury in the next, Venus in the third, the Sun in the fourth, Mars in the fifth, Jupiter in the sixth, and Saturn in the seventh. The eighth sphere he appropriated to the stars, which, despite their distance, were still visible through the transparent crystal. All these heavenly bodies he believed to revolve in their respective spheres around the earth. Ptolemy’s “Syntaxis,” or “Construction,” embodying these views, was received as[Pg 293] authority until Copernicus, fourteen hundred years later, taught the true theory of the solar system.

In this century, also, Justin Martyr wrote his “Apologies” in defence of Christianity against paganism; and Polycarp, bishop of Smyrna, his “Epistle to the Philippians”—both sealing their faith with their blood. From Irenæus, bishop of Lyons, we have inherited a valuable legacy in his “Treatise against Heresies.”

Origen, the gifted pupil of Cle’mens the Alexandrian, an ardent Christian philosopher, flourished in the third century. Among his writings, which, including his discourses, were numbered by thousands, are “Commentaries on the Scriptures,” in the preparation of which he was assisted by clerks who wrote in short-hand from his dictation. Origen also replied effectively to Celsus, an Epicurean philosopher who some years before had attacked Christianity in his “True Story,” a powerful and much-read work of the time.

Neo-Platonism.—The Academic philosophy, modified by its later professors and wrapped in a veil of mysticism, gave rise to the eclectic school of the Neo-Platonists, which was popular among the learned till the time of Constantine. The seeds of this philosophy were planted by Philo the Jew, mentioned on page 104 as attempting to reconcile Plato’s doctrines with the teachings of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Ammonius, of Alexandria, was the real founder of Neo-Platonism, which, as it left his hand, was a medley of Plato’s and Aristotle’s tenets harmonized with the leading doctrines of Christianity. Though Ammonius enjoined his disciples to keep the mysteries of his philosophy to themselves, Ploti’nus, one of his distinguished pupils, unfolded them in his writings and taught them publicly at Rome, where he went to live 244 A.D.

After Plotinus, Porphyry became a shining light of the Neo-Platonists; but he was an outspoken opponent of Chris[Pg 294]tianity, maintaining that the world was without beginning, and denying the divinity of our Saviour. His work “Against the Christians” was afterward burned by order of the Roman emperor Theodosius the Great.

Iamblichus, a successor of Porphyry, went back to the mystical speculations of Pythagoras, and, taking quite a different view from the early Neo-Platonists, turned his philosophy to the support of paganism. The emperor Julian the Apostate was one of his converts.

Eusebius, the learned ecclesiastical historian, bishop of Cæsare’a in the fourth century, was among those who repelled the assaults of Porphyry on the Christian faith. He was a favorite of Constantine, whose life he wrote.

Longinus (213-273 A.D.) was the greatest critic and most learned philosopher of his age. He studied and taught at Athens, and by reason of his extensive information was styled “the Living Encyclopædia.” The most distinguished of his pupils was Zenobia, queen of Palmyra, a woman of refined tastes and unusual talent. By his advice, she revolted from Rome; overpowered by the emperor Aurelian, 273 A.D., she sought to exculpate herself by throwing the blame upon her counsellor, and Longinus was put to death.

Part of this author’s “Treatise on the Sublime” is all that remains of his many works.

Athanasius.—A century after Longinus, lived Athanasius, one of the main pillars of the early Christian Church. His life was spent in contentions with Arius and his followers, who denied the equality of Christ with the Father; in controversy with them, his vigorous pen was constantly employed.

St. Chrysostom (golden-mouthed, so called from his eloquence—350-407) was the most famous of the Greek fathers. He was archbishop of Constantinople, and a voluminous writer of homilies, epistles, and commentaries. His language is elegant, and his fund of figures inexhaustible.

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LIGHT LITERATURE.

Novel-Writers.—The novel and romance are not unrepresented in Greek literature. Heliodo’rus, a Phœnician by birth, who lived toward the close of the fourth century, obtained a well-deserved reputation as the author of “Æthiopica,” a touching, pure-toned, but somewhat sensational, romance. Its heroine, Charicle’a, an Ethiopian princess, exposed by her mother in infancy and brought up in ignorance of her birth, with her lover Theagenes, falls into the hands of pirates and undergoes a variety of adventures. The tale ends happily, quite in the modern style.

Heliodorus, later in life, gave up novel-writing for a mitre, being made bishop of Tricca in Thessaly.

Another Greek novelist, perhaps a contemporary of Heliodorus, perhaps belonging to a later generation, was Longus, author of the “Loves of Daphnis and Chloë.” The scene of this pastoral love-story is laid in the groves of Lesbos, where the hero and heroine have grown up together in the bonds of innocent affection, à la “Paul and Virginia.”

The “Story of Leucippe and Cli’tophon,” by Achilles Ta’tius, an Alexandrian rhetorician who flourished about 500, stands next to the “Æthiopica” among the Greek novels.

Hierocles.—The “Facetiæ” of Hierocles (5th century) must not be forgotten in this connection. Though a Neo-Platonist, grave and learned enough to discuss “Providence and Fate” and make a volume of profound commentaries on the Golden Verses of Pythagoras, he evidently enjoyed a good joke. He has left us twenty-eight brief stories of Scholastici, or bookworms so unsophisticated and unused to the ways of the world that we may call them simpletons. A few of these are given as samples of his humor; from which it may be seen that some of the wit that passes for modern is as old as Hierocles.

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STORIES OF SIMPLETONS.

BYZANTINE LITERATURE.

The list of sophists, grammarians, historians, and other writers belonging to the Byzantine period, contains names without number and without lustre. A love-song of the Justinian era (527-565 A.D.), by the emperor’s privy-councillor, will give an idea of the poetry of this age.

THE DRENCHED LOVER.

THE GREEK ANTHOLOGY.

The Anthology (bunch of flowers) is a collection of more than four thousand short pithy poems, from the pens of about three hundred Greek writers.

Melea’ger was the first gatherer of these literary flowers; his “Garland” contained choice morsels of poetry from the time of Sappho down, many of the best pieces being the work of his own hand. “Meleager’s poetry,” says Symonds, “has the sweetness of the rose, the full-throated melody of the nightingale.” Others added to Meleager’s collection, the last ancient anthologist being the historian Aga’thias, who flourished at Constantinople in the reign of Justinian.

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The pieces of the Greek Anthology are epigrams and fugitive verses, amatory, witty, and didactic. Some of them compare favorably with the best efforts of the writers already considered; while not a few are plainly the sources of some of the household sayings and proverbial philosophy of modern times. (Consult Macgregor’s “Greek Anthology.”)

FLOWERS FROM THE ANTHOLOGY.

A PIOUS ACT REWARDED.

THE PARTNERSHIP.

ENVY.

THE FLEAS OUTWITTED.

CURES FOR LOVE.

THE RAVEN LOCKS.

LOVE SONG.

HELIODORA’S GARLAND.

GEMS OF GREEK THOUGHT.

MINOR WRITERS AND THEIR WORKS.

• Oppian (second century): didactic poems on fishing and hunting.
• Arrian (second century): masterpiece, “Expedition of Alexander the Great.”
• Dion Cassius, a Roman senator (born 155 A.D.): “History of Rome” in 80 books, from the earliest ages to 229 A.D.
• Ælian (second century): a zoölogy and a miscellaneous history.
• Appian of Alexandria (second century): a “Roman History” in 24 books.
• Hero’dian (180-238 A.D.): “History of the Roman Emperors.”
• Diogenes Laertius: his “Lives of the Philosophers” contains a valuable summary of the Epicurean tenets.
• Ga’len (second century), one of the world’s greatest physicians: medical treatises.
• Musæus (fifth century): the poem “Hero and Leander.”
• Tryphiodo’rus (fifth century): poems on the Battle of Marathon and the sack of Troy; a lipogrammatic Odyssey, from the first book of which, styled Alpha, the letter a was excluded; from Beta, the second, b; and so the several letters in turn through its 24 books. This work is lost.
• Quintus Smyrnæus (500 A.D.): his poem, “Things Omitted by Homer,” a continuation of the Iliad.
• Nonnus (sixth century): “the Dionysiaca,” an Epic on Bacchus in 48 books.
• Proco’pius (flourished 550), the Byzantine historian: “History of his Own Times.”

Italy Peopled.—While watching the rise, meridian splendors, and glowing sunset of Grecian letters, we have left unnoticed the dawn of literary taste in Italy, the sister of Hellas, peopled, as we have seen, by kindred Phrygian tribes who spoke dialects of the Phrygo-Hellenic tongue (p. 133). Whether they were the first of human kind to wake the echoes of the Italian solitudes, must ever remain a matter of doubt. Some believe that the Alps had proved an insuperable barrier to previous emigrants from the East; others, that the adventurous Pelasgians, on descending their slopes, found a Turanian population already in possession of the peninsula. If the latter theory be correct, the Turanian aborigines were speedily overpowered by the new-comers and became incorporated with their conquerors.

When Rome was founded, 753 B.C., the predominant Italian races were distinguished as Latin and Umbrian (embracing the Oscans); their languages were closely related, and have been called Italic. The Etruscans, who lived west of the Tiber, though probably of Aryan origin, differed in many respects from the Umbrians and Latins.

[Pg 304]

ANCIENT ITALY
and the
PLACES NOTED
in the
HISTORY of its LITERATURE

[See the above map for the various localities mentioned in connection with Roman Literature.]

The Latin Language, in its most ancient form, was probably spoken by the people of Latium at least twelve hundred years before the Christian Era. For many centuries it remained harsh and unpolished, nor did its roughness materially wear away until it came in contact with the Greek, about 250 B.C. Then its vocabulary was enriched, and it gradually acquired elegance and beauty. A knowledge of Greek came to be regarded as indispensable to a polite education, and Roman children were taught this language before their own.

A reaction, however, ultimately set in, and the foisting of foreign words and idioms on the native tongue was con[Pg 305]demned as strongly as it had once been favored; a strange expression was now compelled to run the gantlet of merciless criticism before it was admitted as part of the language. Cæsar advised to shun a new term as one would a reef; Augustus frankly acknowledged that, though he was emperor of the world, he could not make a Latin word; and Tiberius was thus pointedly rebuked by a Roman grammarian for a verbal error: “Thou, O Cæsar! canst confer Roman citizenship on men, but not on words.”

When the rest of Italy submitted to the arms of Rome, it accepted the language of the conqueror. Latin also supplanted the Carthaginian tongue in Africa and Spain, Celtic in Gaul and Britain, and finally was spoken in greater or less purity throughout the empire.

In its perfection, which it attained during the first century B.C., Latin was characterized by energy, dignity, and precision, its power and gravity compensating for the lack of “Attic grace.” According to its system of grammar, six cases and two numbers were distinguished; nouns, pronouns, and adjectives, were declined; and verbs were varied in form through the tenses and moods of two voices. Thus the Latin had one more case-form than the Greek, but lacked the dual number and middle voice of Greek and Sanscrit.

The Latin alphabet, consisting originally of twenty-one letters, was borrowed from the Greeks through a Dorian colony at Cumæ. Its resemblance to the Greek may be seen by turning to page 87. The character X. of the Roman system of notation is ascribed to the Etruscans.

Ancient Latin Relics.—During the five centuries that followed the founding of Rome, the literary history of the city is all but a blank. Curious specimens of its antique tongue are preserved in fragments of laws and a few inscriptions; but the songs of the first Latin bards are lost forever. The legends of Romulus, the seizure of the Sabine women, the[Pg 306] stories of Lucretia and Virginia, of Coriolanus and Horatius,—these, with many similar traditions, were doubtless the subjects of irregular ballads and heroic poems.

The rough simple verse in which they appeared was called Saturnian;[40] it is supposed to have been adopted from the Etruscan poets, and charmed the ears of the Romans until they listened to the more tuneful measures of the Greeks. The time-honored Saturnian verses were then thrust aside, with the old lays that told the proud conquerors of Italy of their humble origin and early struggles. This ballad-poetry may never have been written; sung from generation to generation, it was kept alive to grace in after-days the epic of Ennius and the pages of the historian Livy.

The oldest existing Latin poetry is inscribed on a tablet exhumed at Rome in 1778. It is a chant of the Arval Brothers, an association of priests founded under the Roman kings, and consists of an invocation to Mars, the god of war, to avert pestilence. Almost as venerable is a fragment from a Salian Hymn, sung by the Salian (dancing) priests in honor of Ja’nus. (See Prof. Allen’s “Remnants of Early Latin.”)

Extracts from the Laws of the Twelve Tables (450 B.C.), which were destroyed in the early wars, have been collected from the works of later writers. The old Latin, however, is very obscure; so much did the language afterward change that in the golden age the Salian poems were enigmas to the Romans themselves.

There are also traces of an ancient Umbrian literature, which has perished.

As Italy received her first lessons in reading and writing from the Greeks, in law-making from Solon, in art from Phidias and Praxiteles, so in polite literature she drew her inspiration from the same source. The early Roman writers not only took their cue from Greek authors, but were in some cases downright imitators and mere translators.

A Greek slave, Livius Andronicus, who may be called the father of Roman classical literature, translating the Odyssey into Saturnian verse, introduced his captors to the literary treasures of his country. Enraptured Rome eagerly snatched the crown of letters as it fell from the head of her elder sister, and for a time the borrowed jewels sparkled on her brow. But she paid dearly for her brilliant ornaments; for, with Greek taste and culture, came also Greek effeminacy and vice.

The aim of the first Latin writers was to give their tongue the same polish as the model from which they copied; but an excess of foreign graces was repugnant to the genius of their more stately language, and it was soon seen that the refinement of the Greek would prove fatal to the vigor of Latin. Accordingly the Roman orators set their faces against any further “Grecizing,” and struggled as manfully to preserve the purity of their vernacular as they did to maintain the moral purity of the nation, fast drifting into the dangerous quicksands of sloth and self-indulgence.

The sixth and seventh centuries of Rome, the period cov[Pg 308]ered by the present chapter, saw the birth of the regular drama and its decline; the earliest attempts at epic and satiric poetry; and the rise of a vigorous prose. Livius Androni’cus paraphrased Greek tragedies; Nævius and Ennius not only contributed to dramatic literature, but called epic poetry into being; Plautus and Terence set forth a feast of good things in their comedies; Lucilius, the father of Roman satire, lashed vice and corruption unsparingly in his hexameters; and Cato laid the foundations of Latin prose.

DRAMATIC POETRY.

The Roman Drama.—While in the later and more developed stages of Roman literature the plastic influence of Greece is everywhere perceptible, in the earlier days there were original elements, devoid of polish indeed, but possessing the rude vigor that distinguished the nation. There was a sort of drama, for instance, native to Italy. It appeared in its primitive guise in the Fescennine[41] dialogues—metrical songs accompanied with rustic dances—which were long the delight of the mirth-loving Italian country-folk. When, however, the improvised jests and satires of these entertainments opened the door to malicious personal abuse, it was found necessary to prohibit libellous verses by law.

The merry songs called Saturæ (from the satura lanx, dish of various fruits offered to the gods) were brought upon the Roman stage in the fourth century B.C. A flute accompaniment and Etruscan actors, who through ignorance of the Roman language merely played the part of dancers and pantomimists, rendered the Saturæ highly attractive. At a later period, these medleys formed the afterpieces to regular dramas.

From the Oscan town Atella in Campa’nia, the so-called[Pg 309] Atellane Fables derived their name—pieces with simple plots, that pictured ancient village-life in Italy, with its inevitable characters of the chatterbox, the sharper, and the long-eared glutton. It was no disgrace for young nobles, appropriately masked, to improvise the dialogue of the Atellane Fable, or sing the songs in Saturnian verse.

The regular Roman drama was a copy of the Greek, and first saw the light at the grand celebration over the downfall of Carthage, when (240 B.C.) a real tragedy and comedy were represented. Their author was

Livius Andronicus (about 285-204 B.C.), who fell into the hands of the Romans when his native city, Tarentum in southern Italy, submitted to their arms. Brought to their capital as a slave, he succeeded in obtaining his liberty and opened a school for his support. The wants of his pupils led him to translate Homer’s Odyssey into Latin; he thus not only provided the Roman schools with a text-book which held its place for centuries, but inspired the people generally with a strong desire to become acquainted with the Greek masterpieces, and gave a spur to the development of a national literature.

Andronicus was no less successful as a literary caterer, when he put upon the Roman stage his Latin versions of certain Greek plays; yet, though the public relished higher and more dignified dramatic performances than the Fescennines and Saturæ, they loved the latter too much to dispense with them entirely. The vulgar off-hand humor of the amateur actors in these performances was long exceedingly popular.

Andronicus had a rough theatre assigned him on the Aventine Mount. In accordance with the fashion of his day, he played entire parts without assistance, until an injury to his voice obliged him to delegate the recitative passages to a boy, who sung them to the accompaniment of the flute, while[Pg 310] he made the appropriate gestures. Thus originated a custom which thereafter prevailed at Rome,—that of having two actors, one to declaim and the other to gesticulate.

Livius Andronicus kindled the first spark of literary ambition in Rome, and paved the way for her future progress in letters. He enjoyed the respect of his contemporaries, and was honored by succeeding generations, though Cicero pronounced his plays unworthy of a second reading. If we except a few doubtful lines, posterity knows his dramas only by their titles.

Cneius Nævius (269-204 B.C.), a Campanian by birth, after serving in the First Punic War, took up his residence at Rome and there made dramatic literature his profession. His first play was represented about 235 B.C.

The Greek dramatists furnished Nævius with the material for his tragedies and comedies, in the latter of which—better adapted to his genius, and therefore more original—he particularly excelled. Closing his eyes to the danger of satirizing the patrician houses, he fearlessly revived the personal attack of Aristophanes in his ridicule of Scipio and the Metelli. His lampoons directed against the latter cost him dear. The verse of the poet,—“It is fate, not merit, that has made the Metelli always consuls of Rome,”—stung them to the quick, and they procured his imprisonment. Nævius employed the time in writing comedies; and after his liberation, nowise daunted by his previous bad fortune, he let fly his shafts at the nobility as recklessly as ever. Rome could no longer tolerate him, and sent him forth from her gates to die in exile.

The fate of Nævius proved a warning to future comic poets. None were ambitious to assume the role which he had played; but, taking Menander for their model rather than Aristophanes, they sought their subjects in the follies and foibles of society at large.

[Pg 311]

So far as we can judge from the scanty fragments that remain, the style of Nævius, though unpolished (for he still wrote in the old Saturnian verse), was nervous, bold, and pointed. His works were for centuries the delight of the Romans, who admired his independence; while succeeding authors did not regard it unworthy of their genius to borrow the spirited thoughts of Rome’s first native poet. His epitaph read as follows:—

Sellar thus puts in English the old Roman’s description of a flirt, which survives from one of his comedies:—

The ablest work of Nævius is an epic poem, which will be described hereafter.

Ennius, partly Greek, partly Oscan by descent, was born in Rudiæ in southern Italy, 239 B.C. After serving with honor in the Roman army in Sardinia, he was induced to visit Rome by Cato the Censor, who appears at one time to have been his patron.

Filled with a desire to refine the taste of his countrymen, Ennius drew upon Euripides for their benefit. The titles of twenty-five of his tragedies survive; but the fragments that are preserved of these, as well as of several comedies, show them to be mere copies of Greek pieces. Though gifted with poetical genius and possessed of remarkable learning, Ennius found imitation easier than original composition.

[Pg 312]

In the following fragment from one of his plays, Ennius denies the providence of God:—

It is not, however, as a dramatic poet that Ennius has won distinction. His renown is based on his “Annals,” or “Metrical Chronicles,” of all their poems the favorite with the Romans, in whose minds they were associated with the heroic achievements they commemorated. The “Annals” must be reserved for the present, while we view the progress of comedy in the works of Plautus and Terence.

Titus Maccius Plautus (254-184 B.C.), a contemporary of Ennius, was the first great comic poet of Rome. A boorish country-boy, he left his home among the mountains of Umbria to seek his fortune in the capital, and was at first quite successful as a stage-carpenter and decorator. The sobriquet Plautus, by which he is universally known, was significant of his large flat feet; nor do his personal peculiarities generally, judging from a self-painted portrait in one of his comedies, appear to have been of a very prepossessing type:—

Unthrifty as he was uncomely, Plautus before long found himself reduced to the menial employment of grinding corn for a baker, to keep body and soul together; but his hardships were the making of the man. While thus engaged, during his unoccupied hours he tried his hand at writing comedies. He struck the right vein; play followed play in rapid succession; the author rose in public estimation, and during the rest of his life reigned without a peer on the comic stage.[Pg 313] Modern imitations of his comedies prove how lasting has been their popularity.

The Greek poets inspired the pen of Plautus; but he paints Roman manners, breathes Roman sentiments, and employs the idiomatic conversational Latin of his time. The tone of his dramas is far from elevating; his humor, though bold and sprightly, is coarse; and his Greek pictures of imbecile fathers, dissipated sons, intriguing slaves, jealous husbands, hungry parasites, and disreputable female characters (for all other female characters, except servants, were studiously kept in the background), had their effect in undermining the stern old Roman virtue. Yet the style of Plautus is flowing and animated; his plays are full of bustle and fun; and we can but admire his fertility of invention and wonderful command of language. Some of his characters are not unworthy of Shakespeare.

Plautus prefaced most of his comedies with prologues, which served the purpose of modern play-bills in that they contained brief analyses of the pieces. Curious requests appear in some of these: women are asked to refrain from disturbing the house by gossiping, children are desired to keep quiet, and mothers are besought not to bring infants to the theatre.

Twenty comedies of Plautus are extant, of which the finest is “the Captives.” Its plot is as follows:—

During a war between Elis and Ætolia, Hegio, a rich Ætolian, buys at a sale of captives Philoc’rates and Tyndarus his slave, hoping to possess himself of a prisoner of rank to exchange for a son, who has fallen into the enemy’s hands. To effect the negotiation, he proposes to send the slave to Elis with a message to the father of Philocrates, who, he learns, is a man of wealth and standing. The devoted Tyndarus, however, seizes the opportunity to restore Philocrates to liberty, allowing him to go on the journey and remaining[Pg 314] in his stead, a change of apparel having been made, to impose upon Hegio. The parting scene between the two, in the presence of their master, is among the best passages of the play. The disguised Philocrates, about to leave, has inquired what message he shall carry to the captive’s father:—

Hegio is moved to tears, and exclaims:—

Hegio, however, soon discovers the trick, and condemns Tyndarus to the quarries—a punishment whose horrors the young man compares to “the torments of the damned.” He is freed from bondage on the return of Philocrates with Hegio’s son—to learn that he also is a son of Hegio, stolen by a slave in his infancy and mourned as lost for twenty years. It had been his good fortune to be bought by the father of[Pg 315] Philocrates, and to grow up the companion of the young noble.

After this happy dénouement, the play closes with an address to the audience, valuable for the view it gives of the characters in the popular comedy.

Among the best-known of our author’s comedies are “the Twins” and “the Three Silver Pieces.” In the former a series of laughable incidents grows out of the resemblance of twin brothers, separated for many years and suddenly brought together. To this play Shakespeare owed the plot of his “Comedy of Errors.” The second derives its name from three coins paid to a man to disguise himself as a foreigner, and pretend to bring a dowry of a thousand gold pieces to the heroine from her father, who is abroad at the time. The unexpected arrival of the father changes the aspect of affairs; but the marriage takes place, and everything ends happily.

The best of the remaining plays of Plautus are,

The Boastful Soldier (Miles Gloriosus).
The Haunted House (Mostellaria).
The Shipwreck (Rudens).
Amphitryon.
The Young Carthaginian (Pænulus).
The Pot of Gold (Aulularia).
The Twin Sisters (Bacchides).
The Lost Child (Epidicus).
The Parasite (Curculio).
The Trickster (Pseudolus).

Terence, “the Prince of the Roman Drama,” flourished be[Pg 316]tween 195 and 159 B.C. Of his life the accounts are scanty and unsatisfactory. He appears to have been a Carthaginian slave-boy, the property of a Roman senator, who treated him with great kindness, gave him an education, and at last set him free. The youth’s mind matured early; and when only twenty-one he submitted his first comedy, “the Andrian Maid,” to the ædiles, who superintended dramatic representations, for their acceptance. Referred by them to Cæcilius, a comic poet of distinction, he repaired to the house of the latter at supper-time, and, humbly seated on a stool, began to read his play. The first few verses revealed to Cæcilius the genius of the young author; he beckoned Terence to a seat beside him, heard him through, and accepted his comedy at once.

On the performance of “the Andrian Maid,” the reputation of Terence was secured. His plays paid him handsomely, and gave him the entrée to the highest literary circles. The great men of Rome became his intimates; among others, Scipio, the future destroyer of Carthage. They are thought to have encouraged Terence with the view of elevating the masses through his dramas, and are even suspected of having lent him a helping hand in their composition.

After completing six comedies, Terence sailed for Greece, to travel and study there. He is believed to have translated over one hundred of Menander’s plays. None of these versions survive, and they are supposed to have been lost, together with the poet himself, on the return voyage.

Terence, Carthaginian though he was, is distinguished for the exceptional purity of his Latin and the beauty of his style. His taste was cultivated; his sentiments were pure; and his plays put to shame many a licentious comedy of the English stage. In lively humor and comic effect, however, he falls short both of Plautus and his Greek originals. It was in allusion to the source whence he borrowed his plots that Julius Cæsar addressed him as “thou half-Menander.”

[Pg 317]

The masterpiece of Terence is “the Self-Tormentor,” a copy of one of Menander’s lost plays. Its title is derived from the self-inflicted punishment of Menede’mus, an Athenian, who, having refused his consent to the nuptials of his son Clin’ia with a poor but virtuous Corinthian girl, Antiph’ila, and thus driven Clinia to enlist as a mercenary, is stricken with remorse, leaves the city, and imposes on himself the severe toil of farm-life.

Chremes, a neighboring country gentleman, noticing how hard Menedemus works when there is apparently no necessity for it, inquires the reason. The first scene represents a conversation between the two, in which Menedemus, after asking his neighbor how he found time to pry into other people’s affairs, and receiving the memorable answer,—“I am a man, and I have an interest in everything that concerns humanity,”[42]—acquaints him with the state of affairs as told above.

The love-sick Clinia now returns, and, reluctant to go to his father’s house, becomes the guest of Chremes’ son, Clit’ipho, the friend of his youth. At his entreaty, Clitipho sends a slave for Antiphila; but the cunning fellow brings at the same time the lady-love of Clitipho himself, the dashing beauty Bacchis, introducing her to the family as Clinia’s mistress, and passing off the modest Antiphila as one of her servants. The slave thus describes to Clinia, Antiphila and her employments when he came suddenly upon her, and announced her lover’s return:—

[Pg 318]

Chremes finds Bacchis a very expensive guest, and, announcing to Menedemus the next morning the return of his son, tries to put him on his guard against the extravagant tastes of Clinia’s supposed mistress, but without producing any effect on the father thus relieved of his anxiety:—

The play is full of amusing incidents,—the intrusions of the eager Clitipho on the pretended love-making of his adored Bacchis and Clinia—the indignation of Chremes at his son’s seeming want of politeness—the cozening of Chremes by the clever slave out of a large sum for his young master to give to Bacchis. The discovery that Antiphila is Chremes’ own daughter, whom, at her birth, his wife had given to a Corinthian woman to expose, adds fresh interest to the plot. The marriage takes place to the delight of all parties. Chremes is persuaded to forgive his son, who promises to abandon Bacchis for a more modest wife. The “Self-Tormentor” is happy at last, and can afford to indulge in a hearty laugh at the misfortunes of his neighbor.

[Pg 319]

The extant comedies of Terence are,

• The Andrian Maid (Andria).
• The Mother-in-law (Hecyra).
• The Self-Tormentor (Heautontimoroumenos).
• The Eunuch (Eunuchus).
• Phormio (taken wholly from a Greek comedy of Apollodorus).
• The Brothers (Adelphi).

Decline of the Drama.—While the comedies of Terence were drawing crowded houses, tragedy, which Ennius attempted to popularize, that the heroic examples of early times might be emulated by his countrymen, was successfully cultivated by his nephew Pacuvius “the Learned” (220-132 B.C.). The thirteen tragedies of Pacuvius (an accomplished painter as well as poet) were long favorites, particularly with the educated classes. The finest of them, “Orestes in Slavery,” contained the famous scene between the bosom friends Py’lades and Orestes, in which each offers his life for the other. At its representation, the audience leaped to their feet and shouted their applause.

But Rome was no genial home for the tragic drama, and both tragedy and comedy soon began to languish. With Terence, the glory of the Roman theatre expired. Rope-dancing, buffoonery, and the games of the circus, offered superior attractions; and as the Republic lapsed into the Empire, the degenerate taste of the people sought gratification in the sports of the arena, where gladiators fought together or with wild beasts hardly more of brutes than themselves. In this first period of the national literature, the history of the Roman drama is written. (Read Mommsen’s “History of Rome.”)

[Pg 320]

EPIC POETRY.

Nævius, meanwhile, ventured to appeal to the popular taste in a new department of poetry, with his epic, “the (First) Punic War”—in which contest, it will be remembered, the poet took an active part. It was written during his banishment at Utica, after he had signalized himself as a dramatist at Rome, and was a work which Cicero said “afforded him a pleasure as exquisite as the finest statue ever chiselled by Myron.”

“The Punic War” entitles Nævius to the claim of originality as well as genius. The episode of Dido and Æneas, the career of Regulus, and other soul-stirring stories, were told in its Saturnian lines; and it must ever be a matter of regret that so interesting a poem is virtually lost to literature. Nævius is called “the last of the native minstrels.”

Ennius (239-169 B.C.).—In Ennius we are introduced to a greater epic poet, and the founder of a new school. Brought to Rome, as we have seen, by Cato, he taught the young nobles Greek, translated dramas from that tongue, and devoted his leisure to poetical composition. A panegyric on Scipio decided his destiny; he rapidly rose in the estimation of the distinguished men of the time, and in 184 B.C. was made a Roman citizen—an honor to which Livius Andronicus had never aspired, and which Nævius sought in vain.

Though a friend of the wealthy and powerful, Ennius himself seems never to have been rich in this world’s goods. A genial bon vivant, he spent his earnings in extravagant living; and much of his poetry was written while he was confined by the gout, a disease brought on by intemperate habits. Horace, perhaps, exaggerates his failing when he tells us that “Father Ennius never sung battles unless intoxicated.” The family tomb of his friend Scipio became the final resting-place of Ennius; and from his time the name of poet was honored by the aristocracy of Rome.

[Pg 321]

Ennius owes his fame chiefly to his “Annals,” an historical epic, the work of his old age. Here he wove together the ancient legends and folk-lore of the Romans handed down in Saturnian ballads, with later accredited events, and contemporary history, accomplishing the difficult task of adapting the old Latin to dactylic hexameters. Greek metres henceforth superseded the irregular Saturnian verse, the syllables being arranged according to quantity, and not as before by accent. Moreover, the language was indebted to him not only for this improved versification, but for fresh elements of strength, and grammatical changes for the better. Thus Ennius introduced a new era in Roman literature, laying solid foundations on which his successors built. He is recognized as “the father of Latin song,” and it has been well said: “Whatever in the later poets is most truly Roman in sentiment and morality, appears to be conceived in the spirit of Ennius.”

Ennius had a high opinion of his own talents; he deemed himself the Roman Homer, and claimed, in accordance with the Pythagorean doctrines, that the soul of the Greek bard had passed into his frame from the intermediate body of a peacock. And indeed his spirited battle-scenes, his “verses fiery to the heart’s core,” sometimes recalled his sublime prototype; while an air of antiquity breathed in his picturesque style and archaic forms.

The poet’s self-praise was echoed by his countrymen. Cicero proudly styled him “our own Ennius;” Virgil enriched the Æneid with his most musical verses; Horace hailed him as “the Calabrian Muse.” The triumphs of Rome and her heroes were often told in the verse that he made familiar; even during the Dark Ages his works remained favorites, until in the thirteenth century they gradually sunk into obscurity. (Read Sellar’s “Roman Poets of the Republic.”)

The versatile genius of Ennius displayed itself in satires,[Pg 322] epigrams, and didactic poems, as well as in epics and dramas. A curious specimen of his composition was his metrical treatise on edible fish, a compilation from a number of existing works on the subject.

From the fragments that remain of “the Annals” (600 lines in all) we present one of the most pleasing passages,—that in which the vestal Il’ia tells her elder sister a dream she has had, foreshadowing her great destiny as the mother of Romulus, founder of Rome.

ILIA’S DREAM.

The “Annals” were continued, and Homer’s Iliad was rendered into Latin hexameters, by imitators of Ennius. But they were third or fourth rate men, and epic poetry really slumbered after Ennius passed from the stage, till it wakened to new triumphs at the call of Virgil.

SATIRIC POETRY.

In this era, we have to chronicle the birth of a new plant in the parterre of Roman literature—Satirical Poetry. It was[Pg 323] no exotic, but native-born. The germ appeared in Nævius, the bud in Ennius, the full-blown blossom in Lucilius, the ripe fruit in the golden age of Augustus; the leaves were still green in the declining days of the empire.

Lucilius (148-103 B.C.), a Roman knight who fought under Scipio at the siege of Numantia, converted the miscellanies (saturæ) of Ennius into true satire. Though a mere youth, he was intimate with Rome’s greatest statesmen, who were accustomed to doff their dignity in his lively society, and even to frolic with him before dinner. Shielded by them, and taking as his standard the stern morality and lofty patriotism of the fathers, he assailed with impunity prevalent social vices, ridiculed superstition, and denounced political corruption.

In bold relief against this dark background he brought out the noble qualities of Scipio. Always arrayed on the side of virtue, he devoted his brilliant talents to the improvement of the public morals. Yet he occasionally stooped to abuse, if we may believe the story that, having once sued a person for attacking his character, he lost his case because it was shown that he himself was not above similar practices.

The satires of Lucilius were embraced in thirty books, many fragments of which are extant. His style is forcible and not without elegance, though some of his verses are harsh and occasional Greek words lower the standard of his Latinity. He composed with haste, often standing on one foot while he dictated two hundred verses. His satires, had they been preserved, would have been valuable as a mirror of Roman manners.

VIRTUE AS DEFINED BY LUCILIUS.

EARLY LATIN PROSE.

In her prose, Rome owed but little to Greece. Had she never known the Greek masters, she might not have produced a poetical literature, but she would have had her great orators and historians. Statesmanship was the natural profession of her nobles and educated men; jurisprudence and oratory were essential accomplishments of the aspirant to public honors; and Latin was peculiarly adapted to prose composition, which appears to have been practised very early in Latium. The development of this primitive, yet nervous, prose was not left to Greek slaves and freedmen, but called forth the efforts of the foremost citizens,—Cato the Censor, Lælius and Scipio, the Gracchus brothers, Crassus and Antonius, Hortensius. In the period under consideration it began to lose its ruggedness, and acquire polish, grace, and harmony.

Cato (234-149 B.C.).—The early historians of Rome, following the example of Fabius Pictor, the first of her prose annalists, employed the Greek language. It was the elder Cato, the Censor and moralist, the inflexible enemy of all that was Greek, whose warning voice foretold the national corruption that must follow the introduction of Hellenic literature; it was Cato, the philosopher, orator, and historian, who dignified Latin prose by embodying in it his vigorous thoughts.

Inured from boyhood to hard toil and simple fare on his father’s Sabine farm, Cato took an active part in the war against Hannibal, returning after the conflict to his humble rustic life. But his country soon demanded his services in another field; at her bar he won even greater glory, and she[Pg 325] rewarded him with every office in her gift. Cato nobly discharged his various trusts; but it is as the uncompromising foe of effeminacy and vice that we know him best. His political life, a model of economy and uprightness, was a ceaseless battle with corruption—a struggle to banish the luxury he despised and restore the stern virtue of his fathers. But it was one man against a nation, and the current was too strong for one alone to stem. He served Rome to the bitter end, and fell in the traces at the age of ninety, his energies unimpaired, his purpose unshaken.

Amid all his active duties, Cato, whose constitution like his will was of iron, found time for literary work. He is known to have written at least one hundred and fifty orations, not without faults of style, for the amenities he was too apt to disregard, but cogent in their reasoning, clear and powerful in expression. Extensive remains of his practical hand-book “on Agriculture” are extant, which show him to have been familiar with all the details of the farm and garden. In a work on medicine, dedicated to his son, he exclaims against the Greek physicians, and recommends the simple remedies which he had always found efficacious. His prejudice against medical men was founded on the belief that their introduction from Greece was a deep-laid plot to poison his fellow-citizens; moreover, he knew that Rome had thriven marvellously for five centuries, in blissful ignorance of the medical faculty.

Cato’s chief work was his “Origines” (in seven books), a history of his country, deriving its name from the first three books, which discussed the origin of Rome and the Italian states. The aged patriot prepared this treatise just before his death, to throw it into the scale against Greek influence; but not a hundred Catos could have turned the balance then. The loss of the “Origines” is an irreparable one to archæology.

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SPECIMENS OF CATO’S STYLE.

Lælius and Scipio followed Cato, and improved upon his rude eloquence. Their speeches, which were committed to writing, bore the impress of learning and genius.

The Gracchi (169-121 B.C.), sons of the noble Cornelia, Scipio’s daughter, to whom they owed their early education, introduced a new era in Roman eloquence, and have been called “the founders of classical Latin.” Both gave up their lives in the interest of the Commons.

Tiberius, the elder, was the impersonation of clear-headed, dispassionate, argumentative oratory. Caius, the younger, of greater intellectual power, declaimed with such impetuosity that it was his custom to keep a slave at his side to remind[Pg 327] him with the note of a flute when his vehemence became immoderate. Cicero inclined to the belief that, had not Caius Gracchus met an untimely death, he would have been the most brilliant representative of Roman eloquence. Nothing remains of the speeches of Tiberius, and the few fragments we possess of Caius indicate a want of finish.

Antonius and Crassus were the most distinguished speakers of the period that separated the Gracchi from Cicero. Both were diligent students of Greek literature, though both sought to conceal their indebtedness to it. Crassus excelled in the elegance of his language; Antonius, in gesture.

Hortensius (114-50 B.C.).—Crassus, in the last year of his life, highly complimented the young Hortensius, whose promise as an orator he was quick to discern. After the death of Antonius (87 B.C.), Hortensius became “prince of the Roman bar,” a position which he enjoyed until eclipsed by the superior genius of Cicero (70 B.C.). During his early manhood he labored with untiring industry, turning his remarkable memory to good account. His style was ornate, his voice perfect; his gestures were so graceful that actors came to learn their art from him; never before had Rome listened to a flow of language so copious and elegant. As a matter of course his services were in great demand, and hardly a day passed in which he did not either speak or prepare a speech.

Thus Hortensius accumulated a vast fortune, which proved his stumbling-block. Wealth begot a love of luxury, his energy gave way to indolence, and he quietly yielded the first place to his youthful rival. His luxurious villas, with their deer-parks, and gardens whose plants he watered with wine, were more to Hortensius than the victories of the forum. In these charming retreats he loved to entertain his friends, and exhibit to them his menagerie and tame fish—for which he showed more concern than for his servants. The death of a[Pg 328] favorite lamprey affected him to tears. At his luxurious mansion in Rome, the nucleus of the future imperial palace, peacocks were served for the first time at a feast.

The orator’s tastes, however, were æsthetic as well; he wrote poetry, and expended large sums on statues and paintings. His orations are lost. Only the merest fragments of all the above prose writers survive.

MINOR DRAMATIC POETS.

• Lavinius, the rival of Terence, who jealously interrupted the performance of the “Eunuch,” denouncing its author as a plagiarist; yet this play brought Terence more than had ever before been paid for a comedy.
• Turpilius (125 B.C.), a popular comic poet.
• Accius (170-94 B.C.), the last of the tragic poets; 37 tragedies, borrowed to a great extent from the Greek; diction majestic and eloquent.

Early Roman theatres, temporary wooden structures; first stone theatre built by Pompey (55 B.C.), capable of accommodating 40,000 spectators. Pompey’s example promptly followed by others. The orchestra reserved for the chief men of Rome, and not occupied by the chorus as in ancient Greece. Awnings for theatres invented by the Romans. The vast size of the later theatres obliged the actors to wear masks with features much larger than life and arranged at the mouth so as to give additional force to the voice.

MINOR PROSE WRITERS.

HISTORIANS.

• Fabius Pictor: “Annals” of Rome, from the founding of the city to the end of the Second Punic War; careless and inaccurate.
• Cincius (210 B.C.): a truthful and diligent annalist.
• Acilius Glabrio (180 B.C.): History of Rome.
• Calpurnius Piso: “Annals;” style barren and lifeless.
• Sisenna (119-67 B.C.): History of Rome from the destruction of the city by the Gauls.

ORATORS.

• Galba (180-136 B.C.): first master of Greek rhetoric; vehemence and artifice his characteristics.
• Carbo (164-119 B.C.): an unscrupulous, but sweet-voiced and powerful pleader.
• Rutilius (158-78 B.C.): a distinguished jurist.
• Catulus: graceful and elegant; a master of pure Latin.
• Cotta: soft-spoken and courteous; his eloquence of the sweet, persuasive kind.

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Study of grammar introduced by Crates, who, fortunately for the Romans, broke his leg while on an embassy to their city from the king of Pergamus (156 B.C.), and during his convalescence lectured on philology at Rome. The earliest works on Roman law were produced during this period.

(B.C. 80-14 A.D.)

Divisions and Ornaments.—The Golden Age, which now engages our attention, is naturally divided into two distinct periods, bearing the names of Cicero, the greatest of Roman writers, and Augustus, the founder of the empire and patron of letters.

In the Ciceronian Period (80-43 B.C.), a stormy era of conspiracy as well as conquest—marked by Catiline’s formidable attempt to destroy the commonwealth, by the civil war of Cæsar and Pompey, and the murder of these renowned leaders—political eloquence and history monopolized the attention of the master minds of Rome. As a consequence, Latin prose matured early in the golden age; while poetry boasted of no ornaments until, at the close of the Ciceronian Period, Lucretius penned his philosophical poem “On the Nature of Things,” and Catullus produced his erotic odes and elegies.

In the Augustan Period (B.C. 42-14 A.D.), the greatest of Roman poets, Virgil and Horace, lived and wrote, prose playing a secondary part. Tibullus and Propertius put forth their sweet elegies, and Ovid his amatory pieces. Even the pages of Livy’s history are aglow with poetical coloring. But the blossom was as transient as it was beautiful, and expanded only to die.

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ORNAMENTS OF THE GOLDEN AGE
HORACE   CICERO   VIRGIL

PROSE WRITERS OF THE CICERONIAN PERIOD.

Marcus Tullius Cicero (106-43 B.C.) was born at Arpi’num, a Latian town south-east of Rome. As his family (of equestrian rank) had never distinguished itself, he is known as a novus homo (new man). Detecting unusual talent in the boy, his father resolved to develop it by a thorough education, which he himself superintended at Rome. The most accomplished teachers were secured, the Greek poet Ar’chias among the number, and the youth was thoroughly grounded in grammar, rhetoric, and Grecian literature. This early training Cicero sedulously supplemented with a course on Roman law under Scævola, avoiding the whirl of dissipation that surrounded him, and even relinquishing social pleasure for the labors of his closet or to study in the forum the style of the first public speakers. “Who can blame me,” he asked in his oration for Archias, “if while others are gazing at festal shows and idle ceremonies, exploring new pleasures, engaged[Pg 331] in midnight revels, in the distraction of gaming, the madness of intemperance, I dedicate my time to learning and the Muses?”

At twenty-five Cicero made his début; and within two years he rose to the highest rank at the Roman bar by ably pleading the cause of one Roscius against a friend of the terrible Sulla. Successful in this case, to escape the vengeance of the dictator as well as to recruit his failing health, Cicero went abroad. At Athens he pursued the study of philosophy with Pompo’nius Atticus, the companion of his boyhood and ever after his warmest friend. In the schools of Asia Minor, as well as at Rhodes, then a great literary centre, he studied under distinguished teachers, storing his memory with valuable knowledge at the same time that he made himself proficient in the rhetorical art. The death of Sulla having removed all danger, at the age of thirty he went back to Italy, thoroughly restored by his travels, and fired with the noble ambition of making himself the Demosthenes of Rome. Step by step he approached the realization of his hopes, and when, in the prosecution of Verres, the rapacious governor of Sicily, he triumphed over Hortensius (70 B.C.), his end was practically achieved.

Cicero served his country in many capacities, but in none more effectively than as consul; since, while holding this office (63-62 B.C.), he saved the republic from a dangerous conspiracy, headed by the profligate Catiline. The consul’s tact and courage were sorely tried, but prevailed. Four crushing orations laid bare the plans of the traitor and drove him from the city, to fall in a desperate battle with the Roman legions, while a grateful nation greeted the vigilant Cicero as “the Father of his Country.”

But the Roman people were fickle, and at the instigation of an enemy banished Cicero from the city he had saved, 58 B.C. The next year, however, the decree was revoked,[Pg 332] and he returned. When the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey was imminent, Cicero’s indecision told powerfully against him.[43] At last he joined Pompey, who, provoked at his vacillation, exclaimed: “I wish that Cicero would go over to the other side; perhaps he would then be afraid of us.” The battle of Pharsalia (48 B.C.) overthrew the hopes of the party whose cause he had espoused, and Cicero, returning to Italy, accepted the rule and friendship of Cæsar, and settled down to a literary life.

Shortly after, a plot is laid against the dictator; the fatal Ides (15th) of March (44 B.C.) arrive; the assassins do their bloody work in the senate-house; and Brutus, flourishing his traitorous dagger, cries to Cicero: “Rejoice, O Father of our Country, for Rome is free!”

But it was grief, not joy, that the dagger of Brutus brought to the Republic; another Pompey and another Cæsar arose to contend for the mastery of the world. Marc Antony aspired to the dead dictator’s place; but Cicero, now the foremost statesman in Rome, regarding him as the enemy of liberty, upheld the cause of the people and of Octavius, Cæsar’s young nephew. Into the struggle that ensued, he entered with all the spirit of his youth, thundering against Antony his grand “Philippics,” in the second of which are concentrated all his powers of invective, passion, and eloquence. It is Cicero’s mightiest effort.

FROM THE SECOND PHILIPPIC.

The patriot paid for his stanch defence of freedom with his life. Octavius and Antony, becoming reconciled, formed with Lepidus the Second Triumvirate, or board of three, to govern the Roman world; and Cicero knew that the sun of liberty had set. The triumvirs agreed upon a general proscription of their enemies. A reign of terror deluged Italy with blood, but the noblest of those who fell was Cicero.

Antony demanded his life, and Octavius covered himself with infamy by yielding it. The orator met his fate near his villa at Formiæ; timid throughout his life, in the last scene he exhibited manly fortitude. He is said to have been calmly reading the “Medea” of Euripides in his litter when Antony’s myrmidons overtook him; a desperado who owed him many favors, while even his brutal companions covered their eyes, struck the fatal blow. The head and hands of the murdered orator were cut off and sent to Antony, whose inhuman wife, as she fondled the ghastly head in her lap, maliciously thrust her bodkin into the tongue that had denounced her husband.—True as it was, it ill became the time-serving Octavius to say, when afterward wielding the sceptre of the world as Augustus Cæsar, “Cicero was a good citizen, who really loved his country.”

Cicero’s Works.—Cicero was emphatically a many-sided man, and filled a wide space in Roman literature. Though he excelled chiefly in oratory, he has left us, besides fifty-nine orations, a number of philosophical treatises, essays, and many letters to his friend Atticus, his brother, and other correspondents. While deeply absorbed in public duties, he found opportunities, without neglecting these, to pursue the study of philosophy, having in view not only his own relaxation, but[Pg 335] also the moral advancement of his countrymen. His works on this subject, some of which, for the sake of interest and variety, he wrote in the form of dialogues, present a valuable survey of the Greek systems. They assert his belief in the existence of one Supreme Creator and the immortality of the soul. (See Mayor’s “A Sketch of Ancient Philosophy.”)

Cicero’s chief philosophical writings are “the Tusculan Disputations,” imaginary discussions of various practical questions at the author’s Tusculan villa,—the scorn of death, the endurance of suffering, etc.; “the Offices,” a moral essay; treatises “On Friendship” and “On Old Age,” justly considered as among the most charming productions of their class in any literature; political dissertations “On the Republic” and “On Laws;” and a theological disquisition “On the Nature of the Gods.”

THE END OF LIFE.
[From Cicero’s Treatise on Old Age.]

Cicero also wrote a treatise “On Glory,” now lost. It was once in the possession of Petrarch, who commends it in the most flattering terms. The Italian poet was induced to lend it to his aged preceptor; but the latter, driven by poverty, secretly put the work in pawn and died without making known its whereabouts. It never saw the light afterward; although it is supposed to have been destroyed two centuries later by a plagiarist, who had helped himself to some of its fine periods.

As a letter-writer, Cicero excels all others. It was the custom of his countrymen to bestow as great pains on private correspondence as on works intended for publication; and his epistles, eight hundred of which survive, are simple, elegant, and glow with wit, though some of them were written so fast as to be almost illegible. (Consult Jeans’s “Life and Letters of Cicero; Church’s “Roman Life in the Days of Cicero.”)

Our author also turned his hand to history and poetry, but with indifferent success. His works were extremely popular among his contemporaries, some of them selling by the thousand.

Cicero’s Style.—Cicero has always been commended for the cadence of his periods. The art of framing harmonious balanced sentences was his special study, and the Latin language, which he perfected in beauty and richness, was well adapted to his purpose. His style is often exuberant, for he[Pg 337] cultivated the flowers of rhetoric. Character he sketched with a powerful pen, and his speeches are enlivened with abundant illustrations drawn from the wonderful storehouse of his memory. Too often, however, vanity crops out, to mar the effect.

Quintilian declared that as an orator Cicero combined “the force of Demosthenes, the copiousness of Plato, and the elegance of Isocrates.” Through all his works flows a current of mingled majesty and sweetness. Merivale aptly styles him “the most consummate specimen of the Roman character under the influence of Hellenic culture.”

CICERO ON PROVIDENCE.
[From the Treatise on the Nature of the Gods.]

Varro (116-28 B.C.).—The great central sun of the Republican Era was Cicero, compared with whom the brightest of his contemporaries seem but as lesser luminaries whose light is swallowed up in his. Of these, Marcus Terentius Varro[Pg 338] was perhaps the greatest. Years of incessant application, which a boyhood passed among the Sabine mountains at Reate (re’ă-te) had prepared him to endure, won for Varro the proud title “Most Learned of the Romans.”

During the civil war, Varro sided with Pompey. After the triumph of Cæsar, he retired from public life to his favorite studies, the victor magnanimously recognizing his merit by placing him in charge of the public library at Rome. The material results of his literary labors enabled him to live like a prince, and we find him the proprietor of three sumptuous country-seats, one of which was celebrated for its costly marble aviary of three thousand song-birds—Varro’s pets.

All this wealth did not escape the notice of the rapacious triumvirs after the assassination of Cæsar. The name of Varro, then more than seventy, was placed on the proscription list; his property was confiscated; and Antony sacked his beautiful villa at Casi’num, committing his invaluable library to the flames. The old man owed his life to friends, who concealed him from his implacable foe till the order for his murder was countermanded. Augustus afterward restored his fortune, but Varro always keenly missed the society of his books. At the advanced age of eighty, he composed, in dialogue form, an admirable work “On Husbandry,” written in a brisk and entertaining style.

The genius of Varro was remarkably versatile; as over six hundred different books on various subjects, in both prose and verse, abundantly testify. In fertility he surpassed all other Romans; and we can but wonder, with St. Augustine, how he found time to write so much. His most creditable work was his “Antiquities Divine and Human,” a lost treasure, of which the present age, with its profound interest in the religions of the past, severely feels the want.

Varro also prepared a treatise “On the Latin Language,” edited a popular encyclopædia of the liberal arts, and wrote[Pg 339] on history. Throughout his works he appears as a pure patriot, a defender of ancient simplicity and virtue. His satires on effeminacy and affectation are caustic; no one can help enjoying his humorous etchings of the spruce dandy, the dainty epicure, and the finical poet who gargles his throat before reciting his pieces. In every kind of writing that he attempted (and there was little he did not attempt) he is worthy of respect: the familiar line from Dr. Johnson’s epitaph on our own Goldsmith, would apply with equal force to Varro—“He touched nothing that he did not adorn.”

Little survives of Varro’s writings beyond the treatise on agriculture, and a part of that on the Latin language.

Julius Cæsar.—July 12th, 100 B.C., was the birthday of Caius Julius Cæsar, by some believed to be, as Shakespeare styled him, “the foremost man of all this world.” The period at which he lived was a critical one in history. Roman virtue had depreciated, justice was bought and sold, luxury had sapped the vigor of the nation, and vice ran riot. Only one-man power, and that wielded by a clear head and powerful arm, could save the state. The times demanded a statesman who would not shrink from taking upon himself all needful responsibilities; and in Julius Cæsar that statesman was forthcoming.

Cæsar’s whole career evinces ambition, courage, and determination. Sulla himself he feared not to defy, when ordered to divorce his wife for political reasons; and he was adroit enough to escape the vengeance of the ruthless dictator who saw in “the loose-girt boy” many Mariuses. Leaving Rome for the East, he acquitted himself with signal ability, though only twenty-two, in a campaign against Mytilene; and when captured by pirates on the high seas, he paid them an extortionate ransom, but promptly turned the tables on them by overhauling their vessel with a small fleet, and nailing them to crosses on the coast of Asia Minor.

[Pg 340]

At Rhodes he studied oratory and rhetoric. On his return to Rome he gave evidence of his powers in the forum, and was hailed as second in eloquence to Cicero only. His readiness to protect the poor and the oppressed, together with his insinuating manners, made Cæsar the idol of the people, who bestowed upon him various offices and finally raised him to the consulship. At the expiration of his term, he was intrusted with the government of the two Gauls; and the military skill he displayed in this position, during nine years of active service (58-50 B.C.), proved him to be one of the world’s great captains. Overpowering many fierce tribes, he carried the terror of the Roman eagles into the forests of Germany and even across the Channel. A million human beings are computed to have been sacrificed in his Gallic campaigns.

Jealous of these brilliant successes, and recognizing in Cæsar a dangerous opponent of his schemes for political aggrandizement, Pompey prevailed on the senate to demand the resignation of his victorious rival. This brought matters to a crisis. Cæsar with his legions crossed the Rubicon, which separated Cisalpine Gaul from Italy (49 B.C.), and was soon in Rome, whence Pompey and his friends had fled. The battle of Pharsalia the next year decided the question in favor of Cæsar; Pompey’s party was overthrown in Africa and Spain, and the Roman world remained the prize of the conqueror.

Not long, however, did he enjoy it. Fearing his ambition, or pretending to do so, a number of “liberators” conspired against his life. On the 15th of March, 44 B.C., he fell pierced by their daggers at the foot of Pompey’s statue, as that last cry, wrung from his heart by the ingratitude of a trusted friend, resounded through the senate-house,—“Thou, too, Brutus, my son!”

We can hardly see how, amid the excitements of such a career, Cæsar found any time to devote to literary pursuits; yet his name is hardly less eminent in letters than for states[Pg 341]manship and military genius. He seems to have had the rare ability of “employing at the same time his ears to listen, his eyes to read, his hand to write, and his voice to dictate.” While crossing the Alps, on one occasion, he wrote a grammatical treatise of no little merit.

The greatest of Cæsar’s works are his “Commentaries” on the Gallic and the Civil War—the former in seven books, to which an eighth was added at the author’s request by his fellow-soldier Hirtius. In “the Gallic War,” Cæsar not only recounts his successes and feats of engineering skill, but also entertains us with pleasing descriptions of the countries he visited and the tribes he encountered. He always aims at justifying himself, and so plausibly defended his course in “the Civil War” as to carry conviction even to the prejudiced. (See Froude’s “Cæsar;” Trollope’s “Cæsar.”)

In Cæsar’s style, conciseness goes hand in hand with simplicity and perspicuity. Dispensing with ornament, he uses every word to the best advantage—and this despite the fact that he wrote with amazing rapidity. Though, perhaps, he lacks vivacity and energy, there is no purer Latin than his. We subjoin some interesting paragraphs from the Commentaries on the Gallic War, relating to the customs of

THE ANCIENT GAULS AND GERMANS.

Sallust (86-34 B.C.).—Another historian, whose name is as familiar as Cæsar’s to classical students, is Caius Sallustius Crispus, popularly known as Sallust. From his native town Amiternum, in the country of the Sabines, he came to Rome, ambitious of public honors, and gradually worked his way up to a seat in the senate. Alleged immorality, however, caused his expulsion from that body, and not until he had rendered important service to Cæsar in the civil war did he recover his good standing. Cæsar made him governor of the rich province of Numidia (46 B.C.), which Sallust pretty thoroughly plundered during his one year of office, returning to Rome with fabulous riches. It was fortunate for him that, when a Numidian commission arrived to prosecute him for extortion, his powerful patron interposed to save him from punishment.

On the assassination of Cæsar, Sallust retired from public life and devoted part of his ill-gotten gains to the erection of[Pg 344] a splendid mansion on one of the seven hills. It was surrounded by lovely pleasure-grounds, adorned with baths, statues, and other magnificent works of art, prominent among which, on exquisitely chiselled columns, rose a temple, paved in mosaic, and set off with Grecian marbles. “The Gardens of Sallust” were preferred by many of the Roman emperors to the imperial palace itself.

Here or at his Tiburtine villa, our author, thoroughly convinced of the vanity of political honors, and filled with remorse for his youthful indiscretions, spent the last nine years of his life in the compilation of historical works which give us a high opinion of his abilities. His first effort was “the Conspiracy of Catiline,” the facts of which were vividly impressed upon his memory, since, when a student at Rome, he was a witness of its thrilling scenes. “The Jugurthine War,” which followed, treats of the struggle which the Roman people carried on with Jugurtha, king of Numidia. This unscrupulous prince had made his way to an undivided throne over the murdered bodies of his two cousins, allies of the Romans, securing impunity for a time by buying up the senate. Having, however, caused the assassination of another kinsman in the very streets of Rome, whither he had been summoned, on the pledge of the public faith, to expose those who had taken his bribes, he was ordered to quit Italy. It was on leaving the capital that Jugurtha, looking back, uttered those words so significant of the prevalent corruption: “O venal city and destined soon to perish, if you can but find a purchaser!”

A Roman army followed him into Africa; but little was effected until the consul Metellus assumed the command, and, proof against Numidian gold, prosecuted the war in earnest. After five years’ continuance, it was successfully terminated by Marius. Sallust’s history ends with the betrayal of Jugurtha to the Romans, and the triumph of the consul Marius, “on whom the hopes of the state were then placed.” Plutarch[Pg 345] adds that, after figuring in the procession, Jugurtha was set upon by the people, who tore the rings from his ears and even stripped him of his clothes; then he was pushed into a damp dungeon to starve, shuddering as he cried to the bystanders with a maniacal laugh, “How cold is this bath of yours!”

Another work of Sallust was a History of Rome from 78 to 66 B.C., fragments of which remain.

Sallust’s Style, modelled after that of Thucydides, is sententious, energetic, and an improvement on the original in clearness. Condensation without obscurity is its crowning excellence; and its finish, though too plainly showing marks of labor, is always attractive.

The forte of Sallust lay in delineating character; his portraits of Catiline and Jugurtha are as vivid as if the men themselves stood before us. Especially striking are his pictures of remorse. Catiline, who murdered his own son to induce an infamous beauty to become his wife, “at peace with neither gods nor men, finds no comfort either waking or sleeping; his complexion is pale, his eyes haggard, his walk sometimes quick and sometimes slow, and distraction is apparent in every look.” Jugurtha, red with the blood of many victims, “fears his subjects and his enemies alike, is ever on the watch, starts from his sleep to seize his arms, and is so agitated by terror as to appear under the influence of madness.”

Sallust also affects the moralist, and throughout his works is as loud in the praises of virtue as in his life he was careless of her interests. From “the Jugurthine War” we take an interesting account of the

CAPTURE OF A NUMIDIAN FORT.

Cornelius Nepos (74-24 B.C.), though inferior to the writers[Pg 348] just treated, deserves mention for his “Lives of Eminent Commanders,” his only extant work. These sketches, especially the biography of Pomponius Atticus, are clearly written and furnish valuable information respecting the times to which they relate; but Nepos was not an accurate compiler, and dependence cannot always be placed on his statements. As a specimen of his style, we quote from his “Lives”.

THE CHARACTER OF ALCIBIADES.

POETS OF THE CICERONIAN PERIOD.

Lucretius (95-55 B.C.).—Meanwhile Italy produced two poets of high rank, Lucretius and Catullus. Of Lucretius we have little trustworthy information. A native of Italy, he appears, in accordance with the common practice, to have studied philosophy at Athens, where he became the classmate of Memmius. From his poetry, we may infer his indifference to all things transient, alike to social pleasures and the stormy sea of politics that surged around him; his life was probably one of deep thought, tinged with sadness. In dignity he was a true Roman; in sympathy for his kind, a true man. With nature he must have held frequent converse, for Homer alone[Pg 349] of ancient writers excels him in description. His life ended with suicide.

The only work of Lucretius was what Macaulay styles “the finest didactic poem in any language,” “On the Nature of Things.” It was dedicated to his school-friend Memmius, at whose suggestion it is said to have been written. The old story that, having been crazed by a love-philter administered through the jealousy of his wife, the poet composed this work during the temporary returns of reason, is now discredited as a fabrication of later times.

The poem is divided into six books, and embodies the dogmas of Epicurus, which Lucretius vivified with the spirit of poetry and beautified with its most attractive drapery. Pleasure, the chief end of existence, is to be sought by banishing care and distressing thoughts. God created not; but eternal atoms, variously and ceaselessly active, constitute all existing things. The soul dies with the body; it behooves us, therefore, to make the most of the little time allotted us, by dividing it between moderate enjoyment and philosophical contemplation. (See Masson’s “The Atomic Theory of Lucretius.”)

Lucretius also accounted for the origin of the universe, whose government by a Divine Being he scouted; for that of plants, men, and animals, teaching the survival of the fittest; for that of language and the arts. To elevate his readers above degrading superstitions and the cowardly fear of death is his primary aim; and “the constant presence of this practical purpose imparts to his words that peculiar tone of impassioned earnestness to which there is no parallel in ancient literature.” In one of many passages on the subject, he thus speaks of

THE DREAD OF DEATH.

Lucretius reasons plausibly, but on some points, it is too evident, unsatisfactorily even to himself. His work contains much that is worthy of praise, but this only makes its atheis[Pg 351]tical tendencies more dangerous. It was left unfinished at the poet’s death, to be revised and edited by other hands.

The style of Lucretius is not uniformly harmonious; some of his verses lack polish, and he inclines to antique forms. Yet it is dignified, luminous, and animated; glows with all the poet’s enthusiasm, and is marked by tenderness and pathos. The pictures drawn are so real as to awaken the emotions that would be experienced on beholding the originals. Schlegel gives Lucretius high praise: “As a painter and worshipper of nature, he is the first of all the poets of antiquity.”

In the extract given below, the touching description of the cow searching for her calf that has been offered in sacrifice, will show how he dignifies commonplace subjects:—

VARIETY IN NATURE.

Catullus (87-54 B.C.).—Verona in Cisalpine Gaul gave birth to Catullus, the first great Roman lyrist. It was no doubt to avail himself of the superior advantages Rome offered, that while still in the greenness of his youth he exchanged his provincial quarters for the capital. Here we catch occasional glimpses of him—moving among the élite as the equal of men like Nepos, Hortensius, and Cicero; or as the reckless sensualist throwing himself at the feet of some dissolute siren.

Upon the notorious “Lesbia,” who stole, our poet sung,

Catullus wasted alike his love and the finest lyrics of which the Latin boasts. The coquettish beauty at first gloried in her conquest of Rome’s most popular poet, and appears for a time to have been true. Then she grew cold, and cast him off for new admirers. But Catullus, though outraged by her fickleness, could not overcome his unworthy passion:—

At last, however, he renounced his faithless mistress, bidding her adieu in an ode which closes with one of his most beautiful similes:—

Catullus spent his hours of relaxation at his villa in the suburbs of the Latian town of Ti’bur, or at his favorite Sirmio on a lovely lake in northern Italy, the subject of one of his most graceful odes. Toward the close of his life, in the hope[Pg 353] of refilling a purse which his extravagance had depleted, he went to Bithynia in Asia Minor as a staff-officer of the prætor Memmius, to whom Lucretius inscribed his poem. But in consequence of the selfishness of his superior, Catullus came back with wallet still lighter. Of two friends who went to Spain on a similar errand, he archly inquired:—

The death of a brother to whom he was devotedly attached plunged Catullus in grief; and now with nothing to live for, sated with worldly pleasure, in which he found the vanity of vanities, he longed for the fate that soon overtook him.

The Style of Catullus, called by the ancients “the Accomplished,” is lively, graceful, and vigorous; he writes in the language of nature, and excels in suiting his words to the sentiments expressed. The musical measures of the Greeks, adapted by him to his native tongue, lent intensity to his words, and there were “lutes in his very lines.” From the Greek writers, particularly Sappho and Callimachus of Alexandria, he borrowed largely. One of his odes to Lesbia is evidently an imitation of Sappho’s celebrated love-song quoted on p. 169:—

TO LESBIA.

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His book of poems, 116 in number, was dedicated to Cornelius Nepos. Their subjects are as various as the metres in which they are written, for they reflect the passing emotions of the poet, now lighted with gayety, now clouded with sorrow, anon ablaze with love.

Among the other pieces of Catullus must be mentioned his cutting satires, in which even Cæsar was not spared; his exquisite epithalamia, or marriage-hymns; and the “Atys,” a weird poem remarkable for its metrical effects. Our poet’s lyric powers may be further judged of by the following

ELEGY ON LESBIA’S SPARROW.

POETRY OF THE AUGUSTAN AGE.

As prose reached its highest development in the last years of the Republic, so many causes contributed to perfect Latin verse in the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus. Secured upon the throne by his triumph at Actium (31 B.C.),[Pg 355] Augustus pursued a conciliatory course, with a view to winning the love of his subjects, and he was eminently successful. All classes, tired of civil war and its attendant proscriptions and massacres, hailed with delight the return of peace; and under the patronage of the emperor, seconded by his minister Mæcenas, poetry revived.

Augustus was as fortunate in finding at Rome a number of youthful poets, many of them in humble circumstances and of provincial origin, as in the possession of a minister who could appreciate and foster their talents. Mæcenas knew the value of genius too well to let it die of neglect; and his name, as the patron of art and letters, has passed into a proverb. His luxurious gardens were the haunt of poets and savants, and round his sumptuous table sat an inspired circle who poured their grateful tributes into the ears of their master and his.

Thus the munificence of Augustus and Mæcenas, themselves both critics and writers, combined with the political quiet that gave leisure for literary pursuits, to make their period the golden age of poetry. Prose, on the other hand, declined. Political eloquence was powerless in the face of despotism; while the veracious historian must needs tread a dangerous path, or seal his lips.

The poets of the Augustan era were deficient, as a rule, in that creative genius which characterized the age of Pericles in Greece, their works being rather the fruits of art and industry. A long and careful training, in which Greek studies played a prominent part, prepared them for their high profession; Horace tells us that at the age of twenty-three he was still “seeking the truth among the groves of Academus.” Works on various subjects could now be consulted in the public libraries of Rome; and Alexandrian models helped to mould the literary taste of the day. (Compare Sellar’s “Roman Poets of the Augustan Age.”)

Virgil.—In the little village of Andes near Mantua, on the[Pg 356] 15th of October, B.C. 70, Rome’s greatest poet, Virgil (Publius Virgilius Maro), first saw the light. His boyhood was spent on the banks of the winding Mincio in a quiet round of rural pursuits; his father, as owner of a small farm, being among those whom the poet subsequently pictured as the happiest of men.

Romans of the Augustan Age (Becker’s “Gallus.”)

Alive to the importance of education, Virgil’s parents set aside a portion of their slender means to provide for his instruction; and when he reached the age of twelve, his father entered him in a school at Cremona. In his seventeenth year he went to Rome, and there prosecuted the higher studies, familiarizing himself with the Greek poets, and spending his leisure in the composition of lyric pieces. Having com[Pg 357]pleted his education, Virgil returned to his native place, where, amid the natural attractions that surrounded him, he conceived the idea of rivalling Theocritus in bucolic poetry, and in 42 B.C. began his Eclogues.

After the victory of the Triumvirs in the civil war, the lands about Cremona and Mantua were divided among the soldiers who had served against Brutus, and the estate of Virgil, neutral though he had been, was taken from him. On the poet’s application to Octavius, however, it was restored, and in one of his Eclogues he gave utterance to his sincere gratitude. Shortly after, Virgil was ejected again, and this time narrowly escaped with his life by swimming the Mincio. Nor does he appear to have ever been reinstated. Octavius, however, loaded him with favors; and a house in Rome near the palace of his friend Mæcenas, with a lovely villa in the suburbs of Naples, where the climate agreed better with his delicate constitution than the damp air of the north, reconciled him to the loss of his boyhood’s home.

The Eclogues, published about 37 B.C., established Virgil’s reputation as a pastoral poet, and gained him no mean place among the literary and political celebrities that crowded the house of Mæcenas. It was by the advice of this statesman that the poet undertook the most finished and original of all his productions,—the Georgics,—a work which, though only about 2200 lines in length, occupied him for seven years.

Having declared in this poem that “he would wed Cæsar’s glories to an epic strain,” Virgil was held to his promise by the emperor, at whose solicitation he gave the rest of his life (eleven years) to the composition of the Æneid. In this great epic, like the Odyssey a sequel to the Iliad, the origin of Rome is traced back to ancient Troy, and the genealogy of Augustus to her greatest surviving hero, “the pious Æneas.” Death stopped the poet’s pen when three years’ labor was yet necessary, in his estimation, to perfect his work.

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It appears that in the year 19 B.C. Virgil undertook a tour through Greece and Asia Minor, to acquaint himself with the geography of the countries described in the Æneid; but meeting Augustus at Athens, he changed his plans and started with the emperor for Rome. On the way he was seized with a mortal illness, and only lived to reach the harbor of Brundisium in southern Italy. On his death-bed, Virgil besought his friends to bring him the manuscript of his epic, that he might consign it to the flames; but they wisely saved a masterpiece which the modesty of its author would have condemned to oblivion.

Virgil was interred at Naples. A simple vault, overgrown with ivy and wild myrtle, still marks his grave. On a marble slab set in the rock opposite is the inscription which Dryden has thus rendered:—

Virgil has been described as a tall, dark-complexioned man, careless of his dress, and with awkward country airs. His life was that of a student; and despite the fact that he was a martyr to dyspepsia and pulmonary disease, he did not allow his delicate health to interfere with his literary labors. Of gentle, unassuming manners, he would fly from the admiring crowds that followed him in the streets; and none would have inferred from his appearance or conversation that he was a great poet. He was more than a great poet—he was a pure, unselfish, honest man, uncontaminated by the prevailing vices. Not the least among his virtues was filial piety. His countrymen felt how great and noble he was, when they rose in the theatre and paid him equal honor with the emperor himself.

Had he lived, it was Virgil’s purpose, after completing the Æneid, to study philosophy, the love of which he had imbibed in early life from the verses of Lucretius. The investigation[Pg 359] of truth was his highest aim; and there are reasons for believing that he had in mind the preparation of a grand philosophical poem that might have cast into the shade the stately treatise “On the Nature of Things.”

Such liberality had Virgil experienced from his friends that he left a fortune of $400,000, to be divided, as he never married, among his brother, Augustus, Mæcenas, and others of his associates.

The Eclogues.—Virgil was the first Roman writer to cultivate pastoral poetry, and his Eclogues (selections), or more properly Bucolics (shepherd poems), are mostly dialogues, in imitation of the idyls of Theocritus. Various subjects are charmingly discussed by imaginary shepherds, in whom one sometimes recognizes the poet and his friends.

The least understood of Virgil’s Eclogues is the one entitled “Pollio,” from the name of the consul to whom it is addressed. It was written B.C. 40, and predicts the coming of a wondrous Child, whose birth would usher in a golden age of peace and happiness. Some have seen in this child an unconscious allusion to the Babe of Bethlehem, whose advent the Sibylline oracles are believed to have foretold. Perhaps Virgil had heard of the Hebrew prophecies indirectly through the Alexandrian Greeks, and recast them in Latin verse; perhaps it was but a Roman infant—Pollio’s child—whose birth he sung in an exaggerated strain. However this may be, we may remember that the heathen as well as the Jewish world at this time expected a great reformer, who should restore the innocence and bliss of by-gone ages.

EXTRACT FROM THE POLLIO.

The Georgics.—Having shown his powers in the Eclogues, Virgil was not unwilling to put them to a further proof, when Mæcenas suggested a work on husbandry, which should dignify that ancient art and revive a love for the simple pursuits of the fathers of the Republic.

Taking Hesiod’s “Works and Days” as his model, he added the artistic Georgics (agricultural poem) to the works of Cato and Varro on rural life. No less elevated in tone than theirs, it possesses an additional attraction in its dress of verse, glows with the author’s love of nature, and displays his ardent zeal to check the national decay. Virgil labored upon the Georgics for seven years, it being his habit to rise betimes[Pg 361] and dictate in the early morning verses which he spent the rest of the day in polishing and condensing.

The Georgics is a didactic poem, and as such, with the work of Lucretius, represents the only department in which the Romans excelled both the Greeks and all modern nations. The first of its four books is devoted to tillage; it gives directions for ploughing (early and often, was Virgil’s motto), sowing, and fertilizing, and explains the signs of the weather. We learn from it that the pests of the modern farmer were not unknown to the old Roman husbandman:—

Arboriculture is treated minutely in the second book, the vine receiving the principal share of attention. Here we have the most beautiful of those digressions which lend an enchanting variety to the style of the Georgics—the poet’s glowing eulogy of his native land.

PRAISES OF ITALY.

The raising of cattle and the management of bees form the subjects of the remaining books of the Georgics.

The Æneid narrates in epic verse the adventures of Æneas, the legendary ancestor of the Romans. Virgil sums up his plot in the opening lines:—

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Æneas, the son of Venus by the Trojan shepherd Anchi’ses, escaped from burning Troy with his aged father, little son, and household gods. He lay concealed for a time in the mountains; and, when the victorious Greeks had all withdrawn, took ship with the remnant of his people to found a new Troy in the west. After seven years of hardships and mistakes, the Trojans embark from Sicily for “the Hesperian shore.”

Here the Æneid takes up the story. In the first book we see the Trojan fleet driven by a tempest, sent at Juno’s solicitation, on the opposite coast of Africa, near the rising walls of Carthage. Dido, its queen, whom the murder of her husband Sichæus by her unnatural brother had driven from Tyre, receives the strangers hospitably, and by the strategy of Venus conceives a passionate love for Æneas. At her request the Trojan prince tells the pathetic story—the fall of his native city through the wiles of the Greeks, and his subsequent trials.

Æneas returns Dido’s love, but only at last to betray his confiding hostess, and fly with his vessels under cover of the night, in obedience to a warning from Mercury, the messenger of Jove. Too “pious” to disregard the heavenly command, he left Dido to end her sorrow on the funeral pyre.

After a temporary sojourn in Sicily, where he celebrates funeral games to his father’s memory, Æneas at length reaches Cumæ in Italy, and at once seeks the Sibyl. She informs him that his trials are not over, and takes him to the lower world that he may hold an interview with his father Anchises. There he descries among other shades the injured Dido, to whom he endeavors to excuse his conduct.

But Dido averts her eyes “that neither smiled nor wept,” and moves away in silence to join Sichæus, who “gives her love for love.”

Æneas learns from the lips of Anchises the future of his race, and beholds the shadowy forms of kings, generals, and statesmen that are to shed glory on the Roman name. “Augustus Cæsar, god by birth,” figures, as we should expect, the proudest of the throng. At last he espies the great Marcellus, “the Sword of Rome,” glittering in the spoils of the Punic War; and by his side

In answer to the inquiry of Æneas, Anchises tells his son that this youth is “our own Marcellus,” and eulogizes his virtues. Thus Virgil immortalized the name of a Roman prince of great promise, son of Octavia, the emperor’s sister, whose premature death had filled the Roman world with sorrow. When, at the request of Augustus, the poet read this portion of his epic before the royal family, all were moved to tears, and the bereaved mother fainted. She afterward showed her appreciation of Virgil’s genius by presenting him about $400 for each of the twenty-seven lines. The passage is well worth repeating here:—

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VIRGIL’S TRIBUTE TO MARCELLUS.

From Cumæ the Trojan chief sails to Latium, the land of his destiny, and there he receives from King Lati’nus the promise of his daughter Lavinia’s hand. But this provokes a war with Turnus, a neighboring prince, to whom Lavinia had been secretly plighted by the queen-mother. Not until he had subdued Turnus and his Latin allies did Æneas make Lavinia his own and rule as king of Latium. The poem ends with the fall of Turnus in a duel between the rival chiefs. To finish the story, Alba Longa was built by Æneas’ son Iulus, from whose royal line in later ages sprung Romulus, founder of Rome, the Julian family, and their great hero Julius Caesar.

The passion of Dido, as portrayed in the fourth book of the[Pg 366] Æneid, is the most masterly piece of Virgil’s handiwork. We present below the closing scenes that sealed her sad fate.

THE DEATH OF DIDO.

Virgil’s epic was the pride of his countrymen, who, with a pardonable national vanity, pronounced it superior to Homer’s. Tenderness, grace, elegance, rhythmical perfection, brilliance of description, it certainly possesses; yet, with all its beauties, it is not faultless. We miss the wonderful imagination that plays through every page of the Iliad; indeed, Homer furnished the originals of many of its most striking figures. Nor did Virgil disdain levying on Latin authors also.[Pg 369] Whatever recommended itself to him in the poetry of others, he borrowed for his own. And yet he must not be regarded as a plagiarist; doubtless it was his intention to enshrine in a national epic literary monuments of all the great minds of his country.

Æneas, his hero, too often appears as the boaster or the heartless hypocrite, rather than as the ideal of greatness and piety it was designed to draw. The author himself seems to have felt the inferiority of his epic to the Iliad, and hence his wish to destroy it. We are told that it was first written in prose; and then the artist, having a clear conception of the whole, threw different portions into verse as the spirit moved him. (See Nettleship’s “Introduction to the Study of the Æneid.”)

Horace (65-8 B.C.).—The great lyric poet of Rome was Horace (Quintus Horatius Flaccus), a freedman’s son, of Venusia on the roaring Au’fidus. That he might enjoy the best educational advantages, his father took him to Rome at the early age of twelve. Here he was placed in charge of a famous schoolmaster, called by his pupils “the Flogger;” under whose rod the country lad made the acquaintance of Ennius and Homer. To the watchful care and liberality of his parent, who remained to guard him from the temptations of the metropolis, he gratefully acknowledged that he owed everything.

Horace was at Athens, finishing his course, when Cæsar fell beneath the daggers of the conspirators. With a number of hot-headed fellow-students he promptly espoused the cause of Brutus the Liberator, and served in the civil war as military tribune. But Horace’s courage could not stand the touch of cold steel; he ignominiously fled from the field of Philippi, and his estate was confiscated as a reward for his patriotism. Poverty now compelled him to take a clerkship at Rome; and to add to his slender income he began writing verses. This brought him into notice, and in 38 B.C. he had the hon[Pg 370]or of an introduction to the social circle that gathered round Mæcenas. His little farm, fifteen miles from Tibur, the ruins of which are still pointed out to tourists, was the gift of his munificent patron.

This “Sabine farm” was at once Horace’s joy and pride. Between Rome and Tibur, therefore, he made frequent journeys, and the simple country-folk, won by his affability, hailed with delight the occasions when, tired of city excitements, he sought relaxation among them. Beset by the throng of gossips and favor-seekers who haunted his footsteps as the friend of Mæcenas, Horace in his Sixth Satire breaks out into enthusiastic praises of his rural home, with its simple fare and freedom from annoyances:—

The loss of his friend Virgil cast a shadow over Horace’s latter years. His own death was sudden. A short month before, Mæcenas had breathed his last; and thus the promise of the poet not to survive his patron was almost literally fulfilled. In an ode to Mæcenas, Horace had sung,

The remains of the poet were laid by the side of his friend; and thus, devoted to each other in life, they slept together in the grave. (Read Milman’s “Life of Horace.”)

Horace, in his youth, was a free liver, a voluptuary; such, indeed, were the men of his day, Virgil alone excepted. Time, however, corrected his tastes, and at the close of his life we find him playing the part of the moralist. If there is much to condemn in his character, there is also much to admire,—his even temper, contented disposition, and independent spirit. Quick to resent an affront, he was as ready to forgive an injury. His friends found him ever a genial, frank, warm-hearted companion.

As to his personal appearance, we may judge from his own accounts that he was gray in advance of his years, short, corpulent, and withal blear-eyed. This last defect furnished Augustus with a ready joke, when he had Horace on one side and the asthmatic Virgil on the other: “I sit between sighs and tears,” he used to say.

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Works of Horace.—The earliest poetical efforts of Horace were Satires, which, though written in hexameter verse, he called prose-poems. Holding up to contempt the follies of fashionable society, fortune-hunting, extravagance, avarice, etc., they pleased the Romans and rapidly grew in popularity. But Horace merely derides, he does not chastise, the vices of his day, evidently deeming ridicule a more effective weapon than denunciation.

In his Epodes, Horace aimed his blows at individuals with something like the force of Archilochus. But personal satire was not the author’s forte, and his Epodes are hardly equal to his other productions.

It is to his Odes, in the lyric metres of Alcæus and Sappho, whose poetry he not only loved, but recast after his own ideas in his native tongue, that Horace owes his renown. Always brief and to the point, clear and elegant in their condensation, graceful, spicy, true to nature, these poems have been read with pleasure for nineteen centuries. They deal with a great variety of subjects—the grand as well as the commonplace; and, whatever the theme, their author is equally admirable. He paints pictures of moral beauty and sublimity with singular impressiveness. Nowhere in the classics is a nobler character sketched than that drawn by Horace of a man firm in the cause of justice (Book III., 3). Byron presents it in an English dress:—

Horace began writing his odes at the age of thirty-five, and was seven years in completing the first three books; they were issued 23 B.C. That he designed them to include all his lyric productions is evident from the following ode, with which the third book closes:—

The odes of the fourth book were written at the request of Augustus, who commissioned the favorite poet to celebrate the victories of his step-sons over a German tribe. After publishing the original three books, Horace wrote his Epistles, the most finished of all his works. They bear the ripe fruits of his experience, and are full of wise reflections which do credit to his knowledge of men and manners. Sprightliness and wit constitute their charm. Their subjects are various, several of them being literary criticisms; the longest, called “the Art of Poetry,” possesses the greatest value.

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The works of Horace have maintained their popularity in all ages; his sententious sayings have become aphorisms; and to-day he is a greater favorite with scholars than ever. Few classical poets have been so fortunate in their translators.

ODE TO MÆCENAS.

TO PYRRHA.

Varius (74-14 B.C.).—Older than Horace or Virgil in the Augustan galaxy was Varius, the friend who introduced them both to Mæcenas. An epic on the death of Cæsar, highly esteemed by his countrymen,—and a tragedy entitled “Thyestes,” classed with the finest Greek dramas,—have won for Varius an enviable fame.

Both are lost; but we still have the benefit of the poet’s labors as the editor of Virgil’s Æneid.

Albius Tibullus (59-19 B.C.), another poet of the Augustan age, perfected the erotic elegy which Catullus had introduced from Greece. The meagre accounts that remain of his life inform us that he was a knight, and lost his estates near Rome for political reasons, after the overthrow of Pompey. These he partially recovered, it is supposed through the influence of[Pg 376] Messa’la, a noble of the old school, whose praises he never tired of sounding. As aide-de-camp, he accompanied Messala in his expedition against the rebellious Aquitanians, and doubtless figured in the triumph decreed his victorious friend by the emperor.

A peaceful life, however, was more in accordance with his tastes. The hills and dales, the corn-fields, vineyards, and meadows, possessed greater charms for him than the favor of Augustus, who vainly sought to attract Tibullus to his court. Hence we find the poet generally living at his country-seat, amid rural enjoyments.

The elegies of Tibullus preserve the names of two Roman beauties—“Delia,” the early mistress of his heart, and “Nem’esis,” her successor. Delia, “with her queenly charms and golden locks,” first brought him to her feet, and he wooed her in his most finished strains. But, like Catullus, he soon found occasion to lament his fair one’s inconstancy. Delia jilted him for a richer lover, and Tibullus transferred his affections to the imperious Nemesis.

The style of Tibullus is sweet and polished. A pensive, almost melancholy tone pervades his verses. In the following plaintive elegy, the injured but forgiving poet recalls to his false one how tenderly he nursed her through a critical sickness, picturing his dream of happiness with her installed as the mistress of his rural home, and his rude awakening:—

ELEGY TO DELIA.

Propertius.—With the name of Tibullus is often linked that of Propertius, who was born about 50 B.C. at Assisium, among the Umbrian mountains. In this lovely spot he was prepared for the study of the law, which he afterward adopted as his profession at Rome. But Propertius found this calling distasteful; relinquishing it, accordingly, for the pursuits of literature, he aspired to be a Roman Callimachus, and grounded himself in the principles of Alexandrian verse. But too much study made him artificial, and his numerous mythological allusions and digressions encumber rather than embellish. He lacks the sweetness, simplicity, and tenderness, of Tibullus.

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Catullus had his “Lesbia;” Tibullus, his “Delia;” and Propertius, profiting not by the example of his brother bards, lavished his affections on the accomplished but fickle “Cynthia,” who played him false as soon as a rich prætor laid a fortune at her feet. Cynthia was the single theme of our poet’s love-lays, all rapture or gentle reproach. In an elegy to Mæcenas, who had pressed him to attempt an epic, he sings:—

In another elegy he describes his Cynthia’s charms:—

The death of Propertius is supposed to have taken place about 15 B.C. Of his elegies, there is none better than

LOVE’S DREAM REALIZED.

Ovid (43 B.C.-17 A.D.).—Publius Ovidius Na’so, the last of the Augustan poets, was a knight of Sulmo, an ancient Samnite town in the eastern part of Italy. Designed for the legal profession, he was sent to Rome to be educated; but the writing of verses was more congenial than rhetorical studies; and an eminent critic of the day, on hearing one of his early declamations, described it as “nothing else than poetry out of metre.”

After the death of an elder son, his father consented that Publius should follow the bent of his own inclinations, and the poet went abroad to study in Greece and travel in Asia Minor. Returning to Rome, he began his literary career as the glory of the Augustan age was beginning to fade.

For twenty-two years Ovid wasted his talents on the composition of licentious love-poems. In the “Loves” (Amo’res), the earliest of his works, one Corinna is addressed throughout. The hearty reception with which these loose songs met at Rome is a sad comment on the degeneracy of the public taste and morals. They were followed by the “Hero’[Pg 380]ides,” a collection of twenty-one imaginary love-letters, inscribed by the heroines of the past to their absent or unfaithful lords—an original idea with Ovid. Penelope indicts an epistle to Ulysses, Medea to Jason, Sappho to Phaon, etc. In the one last named, translated by Pope, the Lesbian poetess informs the youth of her resolve to take the Lover’s Leap.

In the “Art of Love,” Ovid again overleaped the bounds of propriety, and threw so brilliant a coloring into his pictures of vice that his readers were fain to linger over them, to enjoy, and to admire, with manifest danger to their own morals. When even a daughter of the imperial line was corrupted by them, Augustus, the professed defender of virtue, felt that it was time to stop the dissemination of such principles, and visited the poet with his displeasure. In consequence of a subsequent and more serious offence, in some way connected with the royal family, but the nature of which we can only conjecture, Ovid suddenly received notice to quit the[Pg 381] capital forever, and retire to To’mi, a dreary and desolate village on the Black Sea, A.D. 9. Despite his urgent prayers, the decree of banishment was never revoked.

The works of his eight years’ exile are the “Tristia,” or Sorrows, “Letters from Pontus,” and some shorter poems; they prove his genius to have been crushed, his spirit broken. Tomi gave Ovid a grave; even his request to be buried in Italy was refused.

The best of Ovid’s works were the “Fasti,” or Roman Calendar, a pleasant almanac in verse, and the “Metamorphoses,” ingenious in both conception and expression. While engaged on the Fasti, which he intended to complete in twelve books, one dedicated to each month, the poet was surprised by the decree of banishment, and left his work unfinished.

The Metamorphoses, from which modern writers have largely drawn, gives an account of the transformations of ancient mythology, such as the changing of Io into a heifer, Daphne into a laurel, the sisters of Phaëton into the poplars of the Po, and Atlas into a mountain of stone by the gorgon-head of Perseus. One of the prettiest of these poems relates to the metamorphosis of the ivory statue wrought by Pygmalion, into a living bride, by the goddess of beauty, in answer to the sculptor’s prayer:—

PYGMALION’S STATUE.

With the death of Ovid, the flourishing period of poetry terminated. Among his contemporaries, we may mention, in passing, the epic poets Albinova’nus author of the These’id, and Cornelius Seve’rus, who wrote an heroic on the war between Augustus and Sextus Pompey. The didactic poets Gratius and Manilius also flourished in the Augustan age; the former memorable for his poem on hunting, the latter for his “Astronomica.”

PROSE WRITERS.

Titus Livius.—The last ornament of the Augustan Era is the historian Livy, born at Pata’vium (now Padua) about 59 B.C.—the scion of a noble line that had figured proudly in the annals of the Republic. His was the uneventful life of the scholar, and few particulars of his biography have therefore been preserved. He appears to have begun his career as a rhetorician; to have come to the capital about B.C. 31, for what precise purpose we cannot say, and there to have gained a ready introduction at court. The emperor, already favorably impressed with his ability, is said to have placed at his disposal a suite of rooms in the palace.

Perhaps, as his importunities made the reluctant Virgil the great epic poet of Rome, so Augustus may have stirred the ambition of Livy to become its historian; whether he did or not, we find the rhetorician of Patavium, soon after taking up his abode at the imperial city, entering upon the composition of his “Annals,” a work which progressed simultaneously with the Æneid. As the different decades (divisions of ten books)[Pg 383] were completed, the author, after first reading them to Augustus and Mæcenas, published them for the perusal of his countrymen. They at once made his reputation, and became the received authority on the national history, raising Livy during his lifetime, as at the present day, to the rank of the most distinguished historians. The estimation in which they were held may be inferred from the story of Pliny—that a citizen of Cadiz came all the way to Italy merely to see the great writer the whole Roman world was talking about.

For forty years Livy labored on his history. At the time of his death, which took place in his native town, 17 A.D., he had finished 142 books, covering nearly seven and a half centuries from the founding of Rome. It is supposed that he intended to add eight more, embracing the entire reign of Augustus. Only thirty-five of the original books have been recovered.

The loss of the decades relating to the civil wars is much to be deplored, and it has ever been the hope of scholars that some day the missing parts would be found. Several times has the literary world been thrown into excitement by false rumors of their discovery. Once, we are told, a learned man detected in the parchment covering of a battledoor with which he was playing a page of the favorite historian; but on hastening to the maker of the toy, to rescue the prized manuscript to which it had belonged, he found that all had been utilized in a similar manner. A meagre synopsis of the books that have perished, serves only to make us regret their loss the more keenly. (Read Taine’s “Essai sur Tite Live.”)

Livy’s “Annals” is a model of elegant historical writing, and a repertory of tales and traditions of early heroism, which have made Roman virtue and prowess the admiration of the world; yet his statements must be taken with many grains of allowance. Not that he wilfully misrepresented, but rather that he trusted too implicitly authorities of doubtful veracity,[Pg 384] and shrunk from the labor of thorough original investigation. Moreover, a vein of exaggeration runs through his pages. It was doubtless his intention to be impartial; but carried away by a natural bias, he was too ready to color or cover over the blots on his country’s escutcheon. That he stooped not to curry favor with his superiors is evident from the epithet applied to him by Augustus—“the Pompeyite”—by reason of his warm praises of Cæsar’s rival. Ignorance of geography, military science, and even of the constitutional development of Rome, is conspicuous in his narrative.

As an artist, however, Livy was great. He excels in depicting character, whether directly by description, or indirectly in the actions or utterances of the old Roman worthies. Hence, artificial as they are and often smelling of the rhetorician’s lamp, the speeches which Livy puts in the mouths of his different personages display his genius to advantage. One of the finest, given below, is that of the old Horatius, pleading with the people for the life of his son. According to the legend, in a war between Rome and Alba Longa, it was agreed by the contending parties, to save unnecessary bloodshed, that the question at issue should be decided by a hand-to-hand conflict between three champions on each side,—the brothers Horatii for Rome, the Curiatii for Alba. All fell save one Horatius. We leave the conclusion of the story to Livy:—

THE CRIME AND PUNISHMENT OF HORATIUS.

In addition to the “Annals of Rome,” Livy also wrote historical and philosophical dialogues, which we know only by name. (See Capel’s “Introduction to the Study of Livy.”)

Pompeius Trogus, contemporary with Livy, produced a history of the world, extending from the founding of Nineveh to the Christian Era. Macedonia fills an important place in this work, an abridgment of which is still in existence.

A prominent rhetorician of the Augustan period was the elder Seneca, of Cordova, in Spain. Portions of his works (which consist of rhetorical exercises on imaginary cases, historical events, and circumstances in the lives of great men, written for the benefit of his sons) have survived; but nothing remains of a history of Rome ascribed to him.

The orators Messala and Asinius Pollio graced the early years of the first emperor’s reign; but, when political eloquence was interdicted, they retired to private life,—Pollio, to win new laurels by his tragedies and other literary compositions. Both were patrons of literature, and loved to gather round them the eminent poets of their day. Messala’s orations, known to us only by a few fragments that remain, were regarded as almost equal to Cicero’s; while Pollio, none of whose works have been preserved, was ranked by his contemporaries with Cicero as an orator, with Virgil as a poet, and with Sallust as an historian.

[Pg 387]

MINOR POETS AND PROSE WRITERS.

• Helvius Cinna (50 B.C.): author of the lost epic “Smyrna,” the fruit of nine years’ labor. In one of his Eclogues, Virgil compared himself in the company of Cinna and his friend Varius to a goose among swans.
• Licinius Calvus (82-47 B.C.): poet and orator; elegies, epigrams, and love-songs in the style of Catullus; an epic “Io;” no remains.
• Valgius Rufus, a friend of Horace: an epic and elegiac poet.
• Ælius Gallus: a noted jurist.
• Tu’bero (48 B.C.) the historian: contemporary with Sallust.
• Verrius Flaccus: a renowned grammarian; author of a voluminous Latin lexicon, which is lost. His work was subsequently condensed into twenty volumes.
• Vitruvius Pollio, the great architect of the Augustan Era: he prepared a comprehensive work on the science of architecture, long received as authority.
• Titus Labie’nus: an orator and historian.

NOTES ON EDUCATION, ETC., AMONG THE ROMANS.

Silver Age of Roman Letters.—With the death of Augustus and the accession of his step-son Tiberius, despotism in its worst form was established at Rome, and, as in Greece, a decline of letters immediately followed. Symptoms of literary decay had already shown themselves in the reign of the first emperor, although he took care to conceal his assumption of absolute power under the mask of republican forms, and was known to all as a patron of learning. Tiberius, on the contrary, openly declared himself the enemy of freedom, both political and intellectual; and when, in 37 A.D., his attendants, no longer able to endure his rule of blood, smothered the monster with pillows, Latin literature was at its lowest ebb.

A brief renaissance, however, succeeded; so that the imperial fiend Nero was able to number among his victims an epic poet, Lucan, and a philosopher and dramatist of no common stamp, Seneca. Under the Cæsars, genius was hopelessly fettered; a chance word might condemn its author to the headsman; the poet, the historian, the orator, must needs suppress his sentiments or forfeit his self-respect by flattering the reigning despot.

[Pg 389]

A brighter day dawned with the mild rule of Nerva, Trajan, Hadrian, and the Antonines (96-180 A.D.). During this golden age of the Roman empire, poetry for a time recovered its vitality, and through the stinging satires of Juvenal denounced the abuses that had prevailed in the days of Nero and Domitian; while in the histories of Tacitus, prose indignantly broke its enforced silence, and held up to public detestation the despots of the past. But this revival was short-lived. Latin literature rapidly degenerated, for Latin genius was no more. In the later centuries of the empire, science and jurisprudence alone flourished on the soil where poetry had now ceased to bloom. (Refer to Nisard’s “Études sur les Poètes Latins de la Décadence”)

ERA OF THE CÆSARS (14-96 A.D.).

In the reign of Tiberius, we meet with the names of Velleius Paterculus, the court historian, Celsus, and Phædrus.

Velleius Paterculus is memorable for his epitome of Roman history, a work in other respects meritorious, but marred by its author’s servile praise of Tiberius. Yet we must remember that Velleius was not permitted to see the worst phase of this emperor’s tyranny. When the treachery of the prime minister Seja’nus was exposed, the historian, though not implicated with him, was one of the first to be put to death. He was thus prevented from witnessing the murders of hundreds of other innocent persons—atrocities that might have altered his estimate of his ungrateful master.

Valerius Maximus, his contemporary and fellow-flatterer, prepared a cyclopædia of anecdotes gleaned from the history of Rome and foreign countries, entitled “Remarkable Deeds and Sayings.” It was designed for the use of persons who had not the time or inclination to make original investigations, and, though written in an artificial style, contains much that is interesting.

[Pg 390]

Celsus was the author of a scientific encyclopædia, whose twenty books were devoted to farming, medicine, rhetoric, jurisprudence, and military tactics. The eight books on medicine still survive, constituting the great Roman authority on that subject.

Before his day the art of medicine and surgery had been almost entirely confined to Greek physicians; but Celsus dignified it as a calling worthy of Romans, not only practising with success among his countrymen, but committing to writing the results of his experience. He was the first ancient author who recommended the tying of blood-vessels for the purpose of checking hemorrhage.

Phædrus, the only noteworthy poet of Tiberius’s reign, is known to us by his fables. Of his life, we have few facts. He is supposed to have been brought from Thrace to Rome, as a captive; and to have lived there as the slave of Augustus, who, recognizing his latent talent, gave him an education and finally his freedom.

In the sunshine of his patron’s smiles, Phædrus led a happy life; but on the death of Augustus he was exposed to the persecutions of Sejanus, who virtually controlled the state under the succeeding emperor, and who affected to see in the poet’s fables masked attacks upon his own vicious career. Phædrus, however, outlived all his enemies, and died at a good old age.

The fables of Phædrus, preserved in a single manuscript, were discovered in an abbey at Rheims (1561), and, after narrowly escaping destruction at the hands of some French fanatics, were published to the world. In the main translated or imitated from Æsop, whom their author thus made known to the Romans, they commend themselves for their conciseness and simplicity, as well as for the moral lessons they convey. His “pleasant tales” may be judged of by the following specimens:—

[Pg 391]

THE FOX AND THE GOAT.

THE BALD MAN AND THE FLY.

The three great ornaments of Nero’s reign (54-68 A.D.) were Persius the satirist, Seneca, and his nephew Lucan.

[Pg 392]

Persius.—Born at the Etruscan town of Volaterræ (34 A.D.), Persius was brought to Rome by his mother at the age of twelve, and there educated. In the Stoic, Cornu’tus, he found his ideal preceptor, and to this “best of friends” the poet pays a beautiful tribute in the following verses, among the finest he ever wrote:—

Death overtook our poet in his 28th year (62 A.D.). All we have of his writings is six satires—only 650 hexameter lines. After his death these were published, and elicited unbounded admiration. Other works of his were torn up by his mother, who deemed them unworthy of his genius. Persius bequeathed to Cornutus his library of 700 manuscripts.

The satires of Persius were written in the interest of morality, and what gave them weight was that all knew their author[Pg 393] to be a man who practised the virtue he commended, a man of stainless character in an age of universal licentiousness. And yet we do not find him lashing vice as we should expect. Was he loath to do so, lest the very pictures he must draw might corrupt? Or, was Persius forced to hold his peace in the presence of a despot who revelled in the vilest excesses, whose policy it was to reduce his subjects to his own low level? Perhaps for both reasons he preferred to assail wickedness in the abstract. Certainly his “maidenly modesty” shrunk from portraying the hideous sins that flaunted around him, while his philosophical tenets inclined him to keep aloof from the world. (Read Nettleship’s “The Roman Satura.”)

Poetasters and pedants that pandered to the perverted taste of the day, received the brunt of his attack in his First Satire. The Second discusses the proper subjects of prayer. How few, says the poet, would be willing to have their petitions made public:—

The Second Satire concludes with these noble lines:—

Lucius Annæus Seneca, son of the rhetorician, was born at Cordova B.C. 7, but received his education at Rome under the supervision of his father. From the first he displayed great interest in his studies, and as he grew in years he indulged his natural bent for philosophical researches. So thorough a Pythagorean did he become that he even eschewed animal food, lest he should devour flesh that had once been animated by a human soul. On the remonstrance of his parent, however, he renounced vegetarianism and “lived as others lived” again. At a later period we find him the leader of the Stoics at Rome.

Seneca early made his mark as an orator. Hearing him plead eloquently on one occasion in the senate, Caligula, out of jealousy, threatened to have him executed, and was deterred only by the consideration that Seneca had the consumption and was not likely to live for any length of time.

But Seneca survived this imperial butcher, to become the instructor and moral guide of the youthful Nero. While Nero submitted to his counsels, Rome enjoyed a halcyon age, long remembered by her people as the Five Years. His influence led to the adoption of many salutary measures; it is thought to have been at his instigation that Nero despatched an expedition to explore the sources of the Nile—the first recorded in history. Well would it have been for Rome, had Nero continued to follow the advice of Seneca.

This, however, was not to be; a sudden change took place in the disposition of the prince, when his mother was charged with conspiring against him. It was her life or his; and Nero won. The taste of blood transformed him into a monster, and he forthwith entered upon a reign of horrors that[Pg 395] has no equal in history. Virtue was now the surest road to ruin. Falsely accused of complicity in a conspiracy, Seneca was sentenced to put an end to his own life (65 A.D.). With perfect calmness he received the royal mandate, and caused his veins to be severed; but the blood flowing too slowly, he entered a vapor-bath and ended his sufferings by suffocation. His wife Paulina elected to die with him, and in the same manner; but Nero had her veins ligatured, and thus added several years of misery to her life. To his friends, Seneca was permitted to leave no more valuable legacy than his virtuous example.

Seneca was a great moral leader, the first of a class of philosophers who aimed at winning the people back to the virtue of primitive Rome. His teachings were in strange contrast to the age in which he lived; they bear a striking resemblance to those of the Gospel, with which he may have become acquainted through St. Paul. The fathers of the Church were loud in their praises of “the divine pagan,” but there is no evidence that, as some have stated, Seneca was persuaded by the apostle to become a Christian.

Our philosopher is described as simple in his tastes. Though the envied possessor of a princely fortune, he could consistently write in support of temperance on his table of gold. A cupful of water from the brook was sweeter to him than beakers of Italy’s choicest wines, and the fruits of the wild wood he preferred to the luxurious dishes fashion required him to spread before the rich and great. His fault was weakness, which betrayed him into flattery, and perhaps made him an unwilling accessory to some of his master’s crimes.

Seneca was the author, not only of philosophical treatises, but also of ten tragedies, and one hundred and twenty-four moral epistles. He even attempted a satire on the stupidity of the emperor Claudius, representing him as transformed[Pg 396] after death, not into a god, as the senate decreed, but into a pumpkin. Several other works from his pen are lost.

The best of Seneca’s treatises are those on Anger, Providence, and Consolation. His style, labored, antithetical, and full of repetitions, has an artificial glitter about it that impresses the reader unfavorably.

EXTRACTS FROM SENECA’S WRITINGS.

ON ANGER.

[Pg 397]

ON A HAPPY LIFE.

MISCELLANEOUS SAYINGS.

Lucan (39-65 A.D.), the nephew of Seneca, though born at Cordova, was brought up at Rome, and there became the fellow-pupil and favorite companion of Nero. But the superior genius of the Spanish youth provoked the jealousy of his royal master, who had rather too high an opinion of his own attainments, and was nettled by the public verdict that Lucan, then only twenty-three years of age, was the greatest of living poets. At length the awarding of the prize to Lucan in a literary contest between them so enraged the emperor that he forbade his former friend to recite any more pieces.

[Pg 398]

Lucan’s indiscretion sealed his fate. Not content with libellous attacks upon Nero, he became implicated in a conspiracy against the government, upon the detection of which he was condemned to death. Nero allowing him to choose the manner in which he should suffer, the poet had his veins opened in a hot bath. Becoming faint from loss of blood, he recited a passage from his own “Pharsalia,” descriptive of the death of a snake-bitten soldier:—

and so he passed away.

Lucan was interred at Rome in his own garden. An ancient monument in the church of Santo Paulo contains an inscription to his memory, probably placed there by order of Nero, who seems after all to have rendered secret homage to his genius and virtue. The talents of his wife have been highly commended; and it is probable that she assisted him in composing his work.

The epic “Pharsalia” is the only poem of Lucan’s that we now possess. Its subject is the civil war between Cæsar and Pompey; and it receives its name from the place at which the decisive battle between the rival commanders was fought. Though inferior to the Æneid, it certainly displays talent of a high order. Critics have differed in their estimate of Lucan. That he has faults, none will deny who are familiar with his tumid style and love of tinsel. On the other hand, energy, exuberant imagination, and a fervent love of liberty, are his peculiar excellences. The defects of the Pharsalia are excus[Pg 399]able in a youth of twenty-six. Had the author lived to revise and finish the work, it might have equalled Virgil’s epic.

Lucan is partial to the supernatural; dreams, witches, and ghosts, enter freely into his machinery. In the sixth book of the Pharsalia, he makes Pompey’s son consult the witch Erichtho on the eve of the battle. His picture of the weird woman is quoted here as one of the most imaginative passages in the whole range of classical poetry. Erichtho is the type of a class of impostors firmly believed in by the Romans of that day; the powers with which the poet endows her are simply those attributed to her by popular superstition.

THE WITCH ERICHTHO.

The Flavian Era is memorable for a few writers of note. Pliny the Elder, called also the Naturalist, was an intimate friend of the emperor Vespasian; while the names of Martial, Statius, and Quintilian, are associated with the reign of Domitian, Vespasian’s son (81-96 A.D.).

Pliny the Elder (23-79 A.D.) was born at Como in Cisalpine Gaul, and there passed his boyhood. We find him afterward at Rome attending rhetorical lectures, and still later in his career serving as a soldier in Germany. Nero made him proconsul of Spain, and at the expiration of his term he returned to Rome to find his old friend Vespasian invested with the purple.

Pliny had already become distinguished as the author of a treatise on “the Use of the Javelin,” a “History of the German Wars,” and eight books on “Difficulties in the Latin Language.” He now devoted himself to the compilation of his “Natural History,” the only work we have left from his pen, which Cuvier pronounced “one of the most precious monuments that have come down to us from ancient times.”

We might well wonder how, in the face of his onerous public duties, Pliny found time for literary pursuits so engrossing, did not his nephew, Pliny the Younger, describe to us his wonderful industry. His day’s work began at 1 or 2 A.M.,[Pg 402] even in winter; sometimes at midnight. Before sunrise he repaired to the palace to chat informally with Vespasian, who like him was accustomed to rob the night of a few hours; after which he applied himself to business and study, devoting every spare moment to the accumulation of knowledge. “No book so bad but that something good may be gleaned from it,” was his motto. To be without a volume and a portable writing-desk was a crime in Pliny’s eyes. A slave constantly attended him, to take down his words in short-hand; during his meals he employed a reader, and even in his bath he dictated or listened. “I remember his chiding me,” said his nephew, “for taking a walk, saying ‘You might have saved three hours.’ Compared with him, I am an idle vagabond.”

Pliny the Elder was a martyr to science. In August, 79 A.D., while in command of the Mediterranean squadron, to which he had been appointed by Vespasian, word was brought him that Vesuvius was in a state of eruption. Desiring to investigate the phenomenon, he steered straight for the blazing mountain, pushed on through the rain of hot ashes and pumice-stones, and when advised by the pilot to turn back fearlessly replied, “Fortune favors the brave!” He effected a landing, but only to be suffocated by the sulphurous vapors that proved fatal to so many of the inhabitants of Herculaneum and Pompeii.

Pliny was the master-compiler of antiquity; and he was only a compiler, as he himself acknowledged. His Natural History, in thirty-seven books, is a storehouse of quaint lore, according to its author a condensation of two thousand volumes, relating to astronomy, geography, zoölogy, botany, mineralogy, diseases and their remedies, etc. A penchant for the marvellous, which shows him to have been a man of infinite credulity, was a weakness of Pliny; yet his stories were implicitly trusted in the Dark Ages, and many of them re[Pg 403]appeared in the tales of the Arabian Nights. A few of his curious statements are subjoined:—

ECCENTRICITIES OF NATURE.

HYDROPHOBIA.

[Pg 404]

REMEDIES FOR TOOTHACHE, ETC.

Martial (43-117 A.D.).—The chief poet of Domitian’s reign was Martial, master of the Latin epigram. Born in Spain, Martial came to Rome in Nero’s time and began the study of law. But finding it uncongenial, he adopted literature as a profession, and rose to distinction under Titus and Domitian, his sordid flattery of the latter securing him wealth and honors.

The epigrams of Martial are pithy, pointed with satire, and not without elegance; but the pleasure of reading them is constantly interrupted by coarse allusions and even downright obscenity. Hence it has been justly said that Martial taught vice while reproving it. His poems, however, contain valuable pictures of Roman manners.

THE BEAU.

Statius (61-96 A.D.), a contemporary and rival of Martial, was the author of the epic “Theba’is,” based on the strife of the sons of Œdipus (see p. 200). Despite the fact that the poet gave a year’s work to each of its twelve books, this epic has little to recommend it.

Statius began another poem on the life of Achilles, which he did not live to finish. His forte lay not in the line of epics, but in the improvising of short pointed pieces, thirty-two of which are preserved in the collection called “Silvæ.” Juvenal bears witness to his popularity.

Statius was patronized by the emperor Domitian, but is said to have been stabbed by the latter with a stylus, in a fit of anger. The following tender lines are from a poem addressed to his wife Claudia.

STATIUS TO HIS WIFE.

Sulpicia.—We must not pass over the Roman lyric poetess Sulpicia, the Sappho of Domitian’s age—a noble lady of exceptional genius, who claims that she

A short satire on Domitian’s expulsion of the Greek philosophers from Italy, bearing the name of Sulpicia, still survives. It is valuable, as the only fragment we have from a Roman poetess. From it we extract the following apt simile:—

[Pg 407]

Quintilian (35-95 A.D.), of Spanish parentage but Roman education, for many years taught eloquence successfully in the capital, numbering among his pupils the nephews of Domitian. He had the good fortune to enjoy the favor of the emperor, and filled a professorship to which was attached an annual salary of about $4,000.

Quintilian is honored as the author of the “Institutes of Oratory,” an exhaustive rhetorical treatise in twelve books, devoted to the education of the orator from infancy. “No other author,” it has been said, “ever adorned a scientific treatise with so many happy metaphors.” No other author, it may be added, ever succeeded better in investing a dry subject with general interest. The “Institutes” may be read with profit by all who desire to improve their style.

Quintilian insists on virtue as a requisite of the perfect orator; yet with strange inconsistency excuses a falsehood if told in a good cause, and justifies the doing of evil that good may come. We present a few paragraphs on

THE EMBELLISHMENT OF STYLE.

Among the lesser lights of the first Christian century were Quintus Curtius, who compiled a “History of Alexander the Great;” Columella, a writer on agriculture; Pomponius Mela, the first Latin geographer; Probus, the grammarian; Valerius Flaccus, who wrote the epic “Argonautica,” in imitation of Apollonius Rhodius; and Silius Italicus, author of a third-rate epic on the Punic Wars.

AGE OF TRAJAN AND THE ANTONINES.

Juvenal (40-125 A.D.), the single poet of this age, ranks with Rome’s great writers. The accounts of his life are fragmentary and obscure. A native of Aqui’num in Latium, he came to Rome, and was apparently a student of rhetoric, perhaps an advocate. A chance lampoon on an actor revealed to him his satirical talent, and forthwith he applied himself to that branch of poetry in which he became so eminent. Too modest at first to read his satires even before his friends, Juvenal postponed publishing them until his sixtieth year, when they took Rome by storm. Sixteen of them survive.

[Pg 409]

His fierce diatribes not unnaturally gave offence in high places; and at length the emperor Ha’drian[49] quietly sent their author off to Egypt, to command a Roman cohort stationed there—a disgrace which brought the old satirist in sorrow to the grave.

Juvenal probed Roman society to its very depths, laying bare vices of the blackest dye. In his day, the degenerate masters of the world even out-sodomed Sodom in depravity. Nobles and emperors openly perpetrated the vilest crimes. High-born ladies, in male attire, entered the arena to fight like gladiators; revelled in reckless extravagance; plunged into immoralities that call up a blush in the very recital, and even added the arts of the poisoner to their accomplishments. Thus the poet exclaims against these fashionable murderesses:—