Page:History of Greece Vol IV.djvu/96

78 HISTORY OF GREECE. ous daktylic hexameter. The first departure from this latter ia found in the elegiac verse, employed seemingly more or less by all the four above-mentioned poets, but chiefly by the first two, and even ascribed by some to the invention of Kallinus. Tyr- taeus in his military march-songs employed the anapaestic metre, but in Archilochus as well as in Alkman we find traces of a much larger range of metrical variety, iambic, trochaic, an- apaestic, ionic, etc., sometimes even asynartetic or compound metres, anapa?stic or daktylic, blended with trochaic or iambic. What we have remaining from Mimnermus, who comes about the close of the preceding four, is elegiac ; his contemporaries Alkaeus and Sappho, besides employing most of those metres which they found existing, invented each a peculiar stanza of their own, which is familiarly known under a name derived from each. In Solon, the younger contemporary of Mimnermus, we have the elegiac, iambic, and trochaic: in Theognis, yet later, the elegiac only. But both Arion and Stesichorus appear to have been innovators in this department, the former by his im- provement in the dithyrambic chorus or circular song and dance in honor of Dionysus, the latter by his more elaborate choric compositions, containing not only a strophe and antistrophe, but also a third division or epode succeeding them, pronounced by the chorus standing still. Both Anakreon and Ibykus likewise added to the stock of existing metrical varieties. And we thus see that, within the century and a half succeeding Terpander, Greek poetry (or Greek literature, which was then the same thing) became greatly enriched in matter as well as diversified in form. To a certain extent there seems to have been a real connection between the two: new forms were essential for the expression of new wants and feelings, though the assertion that elegiac metre is especially adapted for one set of feelings, 1 trochaic for 1 The Latin poets and the Alexandrine critics seem to have both insisted on the natural inournfttlness of the elegiac metre (Ovid, Heroid. xv, 7j Horat. Art. Poet. 75) : sec also the fanciful explanation given by Didvmus In the Etymologicon Magnum, v, "EAeyof . We learn from Hephsestion (c. viii, p. 45, Gaisf.) that the anapaestic jaarch-metrc of Tyrtseus was employed by the comic writers also, for