this the only respect in which Solon's poetry typifies the infancy of Athenian literature. Another elegy (quoted by Demosthenes in his speech on the Embassy) describes the misery of the poor in terms which might have been applied to the debt-oppressed plebs of Rome, and seems to imply a conflict of clanned and clanless, men of property and the proletariate, which at one time augured as badly for Athenian as for Roman literature. But Athenian factions were to be fused into tolerable unity by internal tyranny and external war—two disciplining influences which also come out in Solon's poetry, the former in an elegy which foretells the coming tyranny, the latter in the martial spirit of many of his verses, which have been contrasted in this respect with the effeminate tone of Mimnermus, one of his East-Ionian contemporaries. In Solon, then, we see Athenian literature beginning in the rough but manly expression of a social spirit, a spirit in which collective interests leave as yet but little room for that personal and artistic poetry which the individualism of the East-Ionians had created.
But in Solon's age the Athenian people needed to be fused into social unity; and it was the work of the Peisistratids to effect this fusion against themselves. Mr. Mahaffy, in his Social Life in Greece, has called attention to the work of the tyrants in diffusing artistic taste through Greece; and in Athens their fondness of art was sufficiently proved by their building the temple of the Olympian Zeus. But their patronage of poetry and music more directly interests the student of Greek literature. The character of the poetry thus patronised should not escape notice. It was not the drama in its rude beginnings, which, especially in comedy, required a popular inspiration; it was the lyric of Anacreon, Simonides, Lasus, so much better suited to the atmo-
