that the company may join in', and so our feast will not want in refinement.' In other fragments of Theognis, and these genuine, we see the same conflict between good sense and good fellowship. 'Tis a shame to be drunk among sober men, 'tis also a shame to stay sober among men that are drunk'; and, again, 'O wine, in some things I praise, in others I blame thee; nor can I ever altogether love thee or hate thee. A good art thou and an ill. Whỏ with a full share of wisdom might blame thee, who might praise thee??' In all these quotations we see a moral attitude which is about the same as that of average society in our day. But intellectually the bright and pleasureloving Greek would have hated the heavy pomp and stupid sameness of our large dinner parties. Athenæus however observes, on the evidence of Anacreon, that they still at this period maintained the habit, afterwards only to be found among barbarians, of crowding their tables all through the feast with dishes. In fact, they had not yet introduced their dîner à la Russe (Athenæus i. 12 A). But that they had 1 On no point were the Greeks more particular as regards their dinner parties, than that the conversation should be general. As soon as the common listening to a reciting bard became obsolete, it is the serious discourse of a leading guest, as in this fragment and that of Xenophanes above quoted. It is the λeyóμevov ès péσov at Cleisthenes' banquet in Herodotus; it is the demand in Plato's Symposium that Socrates shall not whisper-it is in fact the universal feature of the Greek banquet, We stupid moderns seem to be specially providing against it in our dinner parties, where people are broken up into couples, and so restrained from general talking. 2 Cf. Theog. vv. 510, 627, 836, 873. H already begun to give attention to cooking in the lyric age appears from fragments of Solon (fr. 38) of Simonides of Amorgos (fr. 23, 24) and of Hipponax (fr. 35). To the Greek, brilliant conversation was not an accident, but a necessity in society, and wine was chiefly prized as promoting this end. He was intensely fond of good cheer and of elegant dishes, but the cooks and the vulgar people who made this the end of banquetting were always despised and ridiculed. They compensated, too, for the frequent absence of the female sex from their feasts by that romantic friendship which subsisted between young men in ancient Greece-a friendship which absorbed all the higher affection now felt only towards the opposite sex. On this question the second book of Theognis' elegies gives ample and curious information, and those who compare it (especially vv. 1260, and 1313 sqq.) with the allusions in the courtly Pindar1 will be struck with the free and manly tone of the old aristocrat, and how completely faithful friendship comes into the foreground, while the court poet, who was living among tyrants and their minions, like Anacreon, pictures the sensuous beauty alone, and so degrades his higher genius to a baser level. But these considerations lead us on to a more interesting question, and one on which authors have been almost uniformly astray, the question of the position of women in the lyric, as opposed to the heroic and the Attic ages. It is not true that in this period women 1 Ol. i. 40; xi. 105; Isthm. ii. 1; and fr. 2 of the Skolia. had been degraded, and that the Homeric poems afford models and characters superior to those of the lyric poets. Take the feeling of maternal love, as shown by Andromache and Penelope. The celebrated passage in which the former appears is one of the very best in the great Iliad, and yet I hesitate not to say that an extant fragment of Simonides containing the lament of Danae is not a whit inferior either in sentiment or in diction. In this, the most exquisite of all the lyric fragments, the purest maternal love and the noblest resignation find their most perfect expression, and we may safely assert that the poet, and the age which produced such a poem, cannot have been wanting in the highest type of female dignity and excellence. I quote it in Dean Milman's version; but even that excellent poet's version falls vastly short of the great original. When rude around the high-wrought ark In this our dark unjoyous home Clamped with the rugged brass, the gloom But thou, unwet thy clustering hair, Heed'st not the billows raging wild, The moanings of the bitter air, Wrapt in thy purple robe, my beauteous child! Oh! seemed this peril perilous to thee, How sadly to my words of fear Wouldst thou bend down thy listening ear! But now sleep on, my child! sleep thou, wide sea! Oh! change thy counsels, Jove, our sorrows end! For my child's sake, her father, pardon me!1” There are other, though less prominent, indications in the other poets, not less clear and convincing. We are told that Stesichorus composed a poem called Calyce, which was highly popular among the ladies of ancient days. Aristoxenus has preserved to us the mere outline of the plot, which shows it to have been the forerunner of the novels or love stories afterwards fashionable at Miletus. The maiden Calyce, having fallen madly in love with a youth, prays to Aphrodite that she may become his lawful wife, and when he continued to be indifferent to her, she committed suicide. It was specially noticed by ancient critics how the poet had drawn the character of the maiden as exhibiting the greatest purity and modesty under these trying circumstances, and we are told, or we can at least plainly infer, that this noble feature was the great cause of the popularity of the poem. A careful consideration of the fragments of Sappho will, I think, lead to the same conclusion. There appears to have been, in her day and in her city, both great liberty for women to mix in general society, and a bold independent way of asserting their rights and 1 This great fragment has escaped Mr. Symonds, who should have noticed it in his Greek Poets, a very brilliant but inaccurate book. 1 1 their dignity. She versified, we are told, a dialogue, by some suspected to have taken place between Alcæus and herself, in which the lover says to his flame, I have something to say to thee, but I feel confused and ashamed.' Whereupon the girl in answer to him, says: 'Wert thou a good man, and were the thing thou hast to say to me a good thing, thou hadst not felt this shame and confusion, but hadst said it freely, looking me straight in the face without blushes 1.' She went so far as openly to censure in another poem her own brother, who was in the wine trade between Lesbos and Egypt, and having gone to Naucratis, there fell in love with a lady of beauty, but unworthy of him in moral character; and this poem was celebrated and much quoted by the ancients. A less remarkable poet, Simonides of Amorgos, has left us a more complete fragment on this question— the celebrated poem in which the various tempers of women are shown to result from a kinship with various domestic animals. There are so many curious indications of manners in this poem, that I shall here extract the substance of it. I do so the more unreservedly as the exigencies of our modern universities, with their fixed or traditional courses, are such that even good Greek scholars may not be familiar with it. We are too apt to go round the ordinary course of well 1 Cf. Bergk, pp. 887 and 919. The passage is one of the innumerable instances in which ảyalós was used in a strictly moral sense by the early Greeks; for the quotation makes it plain that the word occurred in the original text. |