1. CORINTHIAN VASE. 2. RED-FIGURED VASE. 3. BLACK-FIGURED VASE. 4. WHITE POLYCHROME VASE.]
tyrant’s younger son Hipparchus. At his court were, among others, Simonides, Anacreon, and Onomacritus. Simonides of Ceos is specially associated with the dithyramb, the chorus in honour of Dionysus, which played a great part in the development of the chorus of tragedy. He was also a composer of odes of victory for successful athletes, though here his fame was eclipsed by his younger rival Pindar. But it is chiefly as a writer of elegies and epitaphs and epigrams that his fame survives. Every one knows that epitaph he wrote on Leonidas and his Three Hundred Spartans at Thermopylæ.
“Go tell at Sparta, thou that passest by, That here, obedient to her word, we lie.”
His fine ode on the same subject is still extant. Anacreon is known even to the “general reader,” through Byron:
“Fill high the bowl with Samian wine! We will not think of themes like these! It made Anacreon’s song divine, He served--but served Polycrates-- A tyrant; but our masters then Were still, at least, our countrymen.”
Anacreon’s main business was, as our poet suggests, the writing of banquet songs on love and wine. It is rather melancholy to reflect that his anacreontics were composed--according to his own prescription--on ten parts of water to five of wine; but all the ancients watered their liquor. How closely tyranny is to be associated with the revival of culture is proved by the careers of these two poets. Anacreon passed from the court of Polycrates, tyrant of Samos, to Hipparchus, one of the tyrants of Athens. When he fell Anacreon went to the still more brilliant court of Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse. Simonides went with him, and there they were joined by Bacchylides, Pindar, and Æschylus.
Onomacritus was a strange person. It seems that Hipparchus had a hobby of collecting oracles, and had commissioned Onomacritus to edit a famous collection of poetical prophecies by Musæus, a half-mythical bard. Onomacritus was detected inserting some of his own compositions, and very properly expelled for a forger. If all the historical forgers of this period had been detected the modern historian’s lot would be a happier one.