CHAPTER III.
THEOGNIS IN EXILE.
Driven from his country through an unsuccessful rising against the party in power, Theognis next appears as a refugee in Eubœa, where a faction of congenial political views has tempted him to take up his residence. But his sojourn must have been brief. The aristocracy of the island was no match for the commonalty, when the latter was backed by Corinthian sympathisers, whose policy was to upset hereditary oligarchies, and to lift an individual to supreme power on the shoulders of the people. Before this strong and sinister influence our poet probably had to bow in Eubœa, as he had already bowed in Megara. The principles to which he clung so tenaciously were doomed to ill luck, and he felt the disasters of his party little short of a personal disgrace. It was the old story of the good and bad, in the political and social sense already noticed; and, as at Megara, the good got the worst of it:—
The fair Lelantian plain! A plundering host
Invade it—all the brave banished or fled!
Within the town lewd ruffians in their stead
Rule it at random. Such is our disgrace.
May Zeus confound the Cypselising race!"—(F.)
Breathing from his heart this curse against the policy of the Corinthians above referred to, and conveniently named after the usurper who founded the system, Theognis soon retired to Thebes, as a state which, from its open sympathy with the politics of the banished Megarians, would be likeliest to offer them an asylum, and to connive at their projects for recovering their native city by force or subtlety. The first glimpse we have of him at Thebes is characteristic of the man in more ways than one. At the house of a noble host, his love of music led him to an interference with, or a rivalry of, the hired music-girl Argyris and her vocation, which provoked the gibes of the glee-maiden, and possibly lowered him in the estimation of the company. But the love of music and song, which led him into the scrape, sufficed also to furnish him with a ready and extemporised retort to the girl's insinuation that perhaps his mother was a flute-player (and, by implication, a slave)—a retort which he, no doubt, astonished his audience by singing to his own accompaniment:—
Shelter to one from home and country driven.
A truce to jests: my parents mock thou not,
For thine, not mine, girl, is the slavish lot.
Full many an ill the exile has to brave:
This good I clasp, that none can call me slave,
Or bought with price. A franchise I retain,
Albeit in dreamland, and oblivion's plain."—(D.)
The verses seem to be instinct with a hauteur bred from consciousness of his aristocratic connections, even whilst the singer's dependence upon his own talents rather than on hired minstrelsy bespeaks him a citizen of the world. But, apart from such scenes and such entertainments in hospitable Thebes, our poet found time there for schemes of revenge and reprisals, and for the refugee's proverbial solace, the pleasures of hope. Whilst a portion of his day was spent in the congenial society of the cultivated noble—the contretemps at whose house does not seem to have interrupted their friendship—another portion was devoted to projects of return, which a fellow-feeling would prevent from appearing tedious to the ear of his partner in exile, Cyrnus. To him it is amusing to find him comparing his hardships to those of Ulysses, and gathering hope of vengeance from the sequel of the wanderings of that mythical hero:—
Yet he returned and viewed his home again,
And wreaked his vengeance on the plundering crew,
The factious, haughty suitors, whom he slew:
Whilst all the while, with steady faith unfeigned,
The prudent, chaste Penelope remained
With her fair son, waiting a future hour
For his arrival and return to power."—(F.)
According, indeed, to Theognis's testimony, it should seem that his Penelope at Megara was as blameless as the Ithacan princess of that name, for he takes Cyrnus to witness, in a quaint fashion enough, that
Nothing can equal goodness in a wife.
In our own case we prove the proverb true;
You vouch for me, my friend, and I for you."—(F.)
It must be allowed that this is a confirmation, under the circumstances, of the poet's dictum, "that absence is not death to those that love; "but still one is tempted to wonder what their wives at Megara thought of these restless, revolution-mongering husbands, as they beheld them in the mind's eye hobbing and nobbing over treason in some "Leicester Square" tavern of Euboea or of Thebes. In such téte-à-tétes Theognis, no doubt, was great in aesthetics as well as moralities; and the sole deity still left to reverence, Hope, became more winsome to his fancy as he dwelt on the refinements he had to forego, now that he was bereft of home and property. The following fragment represents this state of feeling:—
Of all the deities—the rest are flown.
Faith is departed; Truth and Honour dead;
And all the Graces too, my friend, are fled.
The scanty specimens of living worth
Dwindled to nothing and extinct on earth.
Yet while I live and view the light of heaven
(Since Hope remains, and never hath been driven
From the distracted world) the single scope
Of my devotion is to worship Hope:
Where hecatombs are slain, and altars burn,
With all the deities adored in turn,
Let Hope be present: and with Hope, my friend,
Let every sacrifice commence and end."—(F.)
Mr Frere notes the characteristic touch in the fourth line, "The victim of a popular revolution lamenting that democracy has destroyed the Graces." But as time passed, and the exiles still failed to compass their return, distrust and impatience begin to be rife amongst them. Theognis applies the crucible, which frequently figures in his poetry, and might almost indicate a quondam connection with the Megarian Mint, and fails to discover a sterling unadulterated mind in the whole range of his friends. In bitterness of spirit he finds out at last that
Is firm or faithful to the banished man;
A disappointment and a punishment
Harder to bear and worse than banishment."—(F.)
And under these circumstances he is driven in earnest to the course which, in his 'Acharnians,' Aristophanes represents Dicæopolis as adopting—namely, private negotiations with the masters of the situation at Megara. Ever recurring to his "pleasant gift of verse" when he had "a mot" to deliver, a shaft of wit to barb, or a compliment to pay, Theognis makes it the instrument wherewith to pave the way to his reconciliation and restoration. If the whole poems were extant, of which the lines we are about to cite represent Frere's mode of translating the first couplet, it would, as the translator acutely surmises, be found to contain a candid review of the past, an admission of errors on his own side, an advance towards making things pleasant with the other, and a first overture to the treaty he was desirous to negotiate with the victorious party.
In an old comrade or a party friend;
Nor with ungenerous hasty zeal decry
A noble-minded gallant enemy."—(F.)
But the bait, though specious, did not tempt those for whom it was designed. In another short fragment is recorded the outburst of the poet's disappointment at finding it "labour lost." He seems to have abandoned hope at last in the words—
No worldly blessing is a greater one!
And the next best is speedily to die,
And lapt beneath a load of earth to lie."—(F.)
But even a man without hope must live—that is, unless he terminate his woes by self-slaughter, a dernier ressort to which, to do him justice, Theognis makes no allusion. And so—it would seem because Thebes, though it gave sympathy and hospitality, did not give means of earning a subsistence to the Megarian refugees—we find him in the next fragment—the last of those addressed to Cyrnus—announcing a resolution to flee from poverty, the worst of miseries:—
Freedom in word and deed—body and mind,
Action and thought are fettered and confined.
Let us then fly, dear Cyrnus, once again!
Wide as the limits of the land and main,
From these entanglements; with these in view,
Death is the lighter evil of the two."—(F.)
Possibly, as we hear no more of him, the poet's younger and less sensitive comrade did not respond to the invitation. Certainly Theognis shortly transferred his residence to Sicily, that isle of the west, which was to his countrymen what America is to ours, the refuge of unemployed enterprise and unappreciated talent. Arrived there, he quickly shakes off the gloom which the impressions of a sea-voyage would not tend to lighten, and prepares to grapple in earnest the problem "how to manage to live." Though he gives vent to expressions which show what an indignity work must have seemed to
Once elegantly fashioned and refined,"
his pluck and good sense come to his aid, and he consoles himself with the generalisation that
All kinds of art are practised, bad and good,
All kinds of ways to gain a livelihood."—(F.)
Not that he descends in his own person to any unworthy art or part. Having satisfied himself that his voice and skill in music were his most marketable gifts, he set up as an assistant performer at musical festivals; and, in one of his pieces, he apologises for his voice being likely to fail at one of those entertainments, because he had been out late the night before serenading for hire. The poor gentleman no doubt had to do dirty work, and to put up with snubs he never dreamed of in his palmy club-life at home. His sensibilities were outraged by vulgar nouveaux riches who employed his talent, as well as by professionals who quizzed him as an amateur. Fortunately he could get his revenge in a cheap way upon both classes. Here is his thrust at the former:—
Thwarts the designs of elegance and sense.
Nor wealth alone, nor judgment can avail;
In either case art and improvement fail."—(F.)
As to the latter, nothing can be more fair and open than the test to which he proposes to submit his own pretensions, and those of one Academus, who had twitted him with being a cross between an artist and an amateur:—
Friend Academus! with the prize declared,
A comely slave, the conqueror's reward;
For a full proof betwixt myself and you,
Which is the better minstrel of the two.
Then would I show you that a mule surpasses
In his performance all the breed of asses.
Enough of such discourse: now let us try
To join our best endeavours, you and I,
With voice and music; since the Muse has blessed
Us both with her endowments; and possessed
With the fair science of harmonious sound
The neighbouring people, and the cities round."—(F.)
The retort was two-edged. Whilst Theognis turns the laugh against an ungenerous rival, and this in the spirit of a true gentleman, he finds a sly means of paying a delicate compliment to the taste of the public, upon whose appreciation of music he had to depend for support. It is plain that he gauged that public accurately. By degrees it becomes evident that he is getting on in his chosen profession not indeed to the extent of being able, as he puts it in a terse couplet, "to indulge his spirit to the full in its taste for the graceful and beautiful," but, at all events, of having wherewithal to discourse critically on the question of indulgence and economy, from which we infer that he had made something to save or to lose. After weighing the pros and cons in a more than usually didactic passage, he confides to his hearers and readers the reason why he inclines to a moderate rather than a reckless expenditure:—
To purchase decent duty to the dead;
Those easy tears, the customary debt
Of kindly recollection and regret.
Besides, the saving of superfluous cost
Is a sure profit, never wholly lost;
Not altogether lost, though left behind,
Bequeathed in kindness to a friendly mind.
And for the present, can a lot be found
Fairer and happier than a name renowned,
And easy competence, with honour crowned;
The just approval of the good and wise,
Public applauses, friendly courtesies;
Where all combine a single name to grace
With honour and pre-eminence of place,
Coevals, elders, and the rising race?"—(F.)
With these laudable ambitions he pursued with profit his calling of "director of choral entertainments," until, it would seem, upon the incidence of a war between Hippocrates, the tyrant of Gela, and the Syracusans, he was induced to go out in the novel character of a champion of freedom to the battle of Helorus. When Corinth and Corcyra combined to deliver Syracuse from the siege which followed the loss of this battle, it is probable that the Corinthian deputies were surprised to find the poet, whom they had known as an oligarchist at Megara, transformed into a very passable democrat, and seeking their good offices, with regard to his restoration to his native city. These, however, he found could not be obtained except through a bribe; and accordingly, whilst he no doubt complied with the terms, he could not resist giving vent to his disgust in a poem wherein the Corinthian commander is likened to Sisyphus, and which ends with the bitter words—
No power on earth is like the power of gold."—(F.)
It should seem that the bribe did pass, and that while the negotiations consequent upon it were pending, Theognis drew so near his home as friendly Lacedæmon, where he composed a pretty and Epicurean strain that tells its own story:—
Will shortly fill the world, and take your place,
With their own hopes and fears, sorrow and mirth:
I shall be dust the while and crumbled earth.
But think not of it! Drink the racy wine
Of rich Taygetus, press'd from the vine
Which Theotimus, in the sunny glen
(Old Theotimus loved by gods and men),
Planted and watered from a plenteous source,
Teaching the wayward stream a better course:
Drink it, and cheer your heart, and banish care:
A load of wine will lighten your despair."—(F.)
When in the concluding fragments (we follow Mr Hookham Frere's arrangement here as in most instances) Theognis is found reinstated in his native country, the sting of politics has been evidently extracted, as a preliminary; and the burden of his song thenceforth is the praise of wine and of banquets. These are his recipes, we learn in a passage which contributes to the ascertainment of his date, for driving far
"All fears of Persia, and her threatened war,"—
an impending danger, to which he recurs vaguely in another passage. It has been surmised from his speaking of age and death as remote, and of convivial pleasures as the best antidote to the fear of these, that he was not of very advanced age at the battle of Marathon. It is to be hoped that, when restored to home after his long exile, his wife was alive to receive him with warmer welcome than his children, to whom he alludes as ungrateful and undutiful. Probably they had been estranged from him during his absence by the influence of the party in power, and they may also have been ill pleased at his devotion to the artistic pursuits which ministered to his substance in exile and loss of fortune. To the end of his days, peaceful it should seem and undisturbed thenceforward, he fulfilled his destiny as a "servant of the Muses," recognising it as a duty to spread the fruit of his poetic genius, rather than, as in his earlier years, to limit it to his inner circle of friends and relatives:—
In secret, like a miser with his pelf."—(F.)
It would be unhandsome in us to take leave of Theognis without a word of felicitation to the poet's shade on the happy rehabilitation which he has met with at the hands of modern scholars. Time was—a time not so very long ago—when the comparatively few who were acquainted with the remains of Theognis saw in him simply a stringer together of maxims in elegiac verse, such as Xenophon had accounted him; and Isocrates had set him down in the same category with Hesiod and Phocylides. But, thanks to the Germans, Welcker and Müller, and to the scholarly Englishman, John Hookham Frere, the elegiac poet of Megara has been proved to be something more than a compiler of didactic copy-slips—a scholar, poet, and politician in one, with a biography belonging to him, the threads of which are not hard to gather up. The result is, not that his maxims are less notable, but that we realise the life and character of him who moulded them into verse—verse which is often elegant in expression, and always marked by a genuine and forcible subjectivity. The task of tracing this life in his works has been rendered easier to the author of the foregoing pages by the ingenious and skilful labours of Mr Frere.
END OF HESIOD AND THEOGNIS.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
- ↑ Cerinthus was a city of Eubœa, and Lelantum a well-watered plain, which was an old source of contention betwixt the Eretrians and Chalcidians.