glorious for the conqueror himself, but the state or city to which the conqueror belonged was deemed to be glorified in the glory of her citizen. The present ode is long and elaborate. Cary:

O thou, whom Phoebus and the quire
Of violet-tressèd Muses own,

Their joint treasure, golden Lyre,
Ruling step with warbled tone,

Prelude sweet to festive pleasures;
Minstrels hail thy sprightly measures

Soon as shook from quivering strings,

Leading the choral bands, thy loud preamble rings.

In the mazes, steep'd, expire

Bolts of ever-flowing fire.

Jove's eagle on the sceptre slumbers,
Possess'd by thy enchanting numbers
On either side, his rapid wing,
Drops, entranc'd the feather'd king ;
Black vapor o'er his curvèd head,
Sealing his eyelids, sweetly shed;
Upheaving his moist back he lies
Held down with thrilling harmonies.
Mars the rough lance has laid apart,
And yields to song his stormy heart.
No god but of his mood disarm'd,

Is with thy tuneful weapons charm'd;

Soon as Latona's sapient son

And deep-zon'd Muses have their lays begun.

But whomsoever Jove

Hath look'd on without love,

Are anguish'd when they hear the voiceful sound;

Whether on land they be,

Or in the raging sea;

With him, outstretch'd on dread Tartarian bound,
Hundred-headed Typhon; erst

In famed Cilicia's cavern nurst;

Foe of the gods; whose shaggy breast,

By Cuma's sea-beat mound, is prest;

Pent by plains of Sicily,

And that snow'd pillar heavenly high,

Ætna, nurse of ceaseless frost;
From whose cavern'd depths aspire,
In purest folds upwreathing, tost,
Fountains of approachless fire.

By day, a flood of smoldering smoke,
With sullen gleam, the torrents pour;
But in darkness, many a rock,
Crimson flame, along the shore,
Hurl to the deep with deaf'ning roar.
From that Worm, aloft are thrown
The wells of Vulcan, full of fear;
A marvel strange to look upon;
And, for the passing mariner,
As marvelous to hear;

How Ætna's top with umbrage black,

And soil, do hold him bound;

And by that pallet, all his back

Is scored with many a wound.

Mr. H. N. Coleridge's sentence on Pindar, which may be condensed into this, is perhaps not unjust:

"Such as he was, he stood, and he stands, aloft and aloof -unsurpassable-inimitable-incomparable... the absolute master of lyric song."

If we seem by our order of treatment to make Sappho a sort of pendant to Pindar, that is not to imply on her part either posteriority in time or inferiority in genius. Sappho, in fact, preceded Pindar by two generations, and her tradition is that of a poetical genius perhaps even surpassing him. A Tenth Muse, Plato calls her, and she remains to this day in general estimation among those entitled to adjudge her just rank, from the various trustworthy indications that survive, the foremost woman of genius in the world. The loss of her poems is probably one of the greatest losses that the literature of mankind ever suffered.

The one surviving complete piece of Sappho's is her Hymn to Aph-ro-di'te. This we give in a version from the hand of Mr. T. W. Higginson:

Beautiful-throned, immortal Aphrodite !

Daughter of Zeus, beguiler, I implore thee,
Weigh me not down with weariness and anguish,
O thou most holy!

Come to me now! if ever thou in kindness

Harkenedst my words,—and often hast thou harkened,
Heeding, and coming from the mansion golden

Of thy great Father.

Yoking thy chariot borne by thy most lovely
Consecrated birds, with dusky-tinted pinions,
Wafting swift wings from utmost heights of heaven

Through the mid-ether:

Swiftly they vanished, leaving thee, O goddess,
Smiling, with face immortal in its beauty,
Asking why I grieved, and why in utter longing
I had dared call thee;

Asking what I sought, thus hopeless in desiring,
'Wildered in brain, and spreading nets of passion

Alas, for whom? and saidst thou, "Who hast harmed thee?
O my poor Sappho !

"Though now he flies, ere long he shall pursue thee;
Fearing thy gifts, he too in turn shall bring them;
Loveless to-day, to-morrow he shall woo thee,

Though thou shouldst spurn him."

Thus seek me now, O holy Aphrodite !

Save me from anguish, give me all I ask for,

Gifts at thy hand; and thine shall be the glory,
Sacred protector!

Si-mon'i-des, too, was an earlier poet than Pindar, but he survives only in a few fragments, or else in very brief epigrams. He was, like Pindar, a hireling poet, in the sense of being at the service of such patrons as were willing to subsidize his muse. In other words, he was poet-laureate, not, like Lord Tennyson, on a royal yearly stipend, but, as the commercial phrase is, by the job. If we may trust Aristotle, he was, upon occasion, spirited as to the price for which he would work. Asked once to celebrate in verse the triumph of mules in a race, he refused, alleging for ground, that to sing of "half-asses" would disgrace his lyre. The inducement was increased, and Simonides, bethinking himself now that mules, if they were offspring of asses, were also offspring of horses, accepted the task proposed and burst out with magnificent well-paid-for poetical enthusiasm, "Daughters of tempest-footed steeds!" Your point of view is a great matter in the art of putting things. One must not lightly think too ill of the poet-laureate that may be hired. Wordsworth did not scruple to ennoble this poet by describing him as "pure Simonides."

The fame of Simonides rests chiefly on his epigrams. "Epigram," as thus used, must be understood to mean a short piece, probably of verse, designed for an inscription. Mil

tiades is said to have erected a statue of the god Pan, in commemoration of this Arcadian divinity's supposed intervention on behalf of the Greeks against the Medo-Persians during the invasion under Darius. Mark the fitness, simplicity, density, fullness, with which the following epigram on the statue tells the whole story. The traits specified are very well reproduced in the translation:

Me, goat-foot Pan, the Arcad-the Medes' fear,

The Athenians' friend-Miltiades placed here.

The most celebrated, perhaps, of all the epigrams of Simonides is that on the Spartan Three Hundred who fell at Thermopyla. It is thus fitly and felicitously rendered by Mr. Bowles:

Go tell the Spartans, thou that passest by,

That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.

These epigrammatic poems are not what one would call brilliant. Their merit is their severe simplicity. They grow upon one in power, according as they grow in familiarity. This is exactly what should be the case with them. They would not else be suited to their purpose.

With predecessors like Sappho and Simonides, Pindar must owe it as much to his fortune as to his merit, that he stands apart and alone in his superior fame. It is, perhaps, an instance of the survival less of the fittest, than of the most fortunate.

XII.

THEOCRITUS (BION, MOSCHUS).

THEOCRITUS is the great name in Greek idyllic poetry. With Theocritus are associated, in a kind of parasitic renown, two other Greek pastoral poets, Bion and Moschus. These two are chiefly celebrated as authors of elegies that not only are fine in themselves, but are noteworthy for being