The Historians' History of the World 03 [Greece to the Peloponnesian War]

A Greek Orator

A peculiar kind of public oration which attained to importance in the Athens of Pericles was the speech in honour of citizens who had fallen in battle. By a special statute which dates from the time of Cimon, a speech of this character was associated with a public funeral; and it was the custom to commission the most approved orator of the day to deliver this funeral oration in the name of the community, as an honourable distinction and acknowledgment of the public services of the deceased. Wordy and elaborate eulogiums did not suit the taste of the time. At such moments, when the citizens felt themselves smitten with grievous loss, it seemed a worthier task to bid them take courage, to turn their mourning into thanksgiving, their sorrow into joy and pride, by holding up before them the lofty interests of the public service for which their fellow citizens had laid down their lives, and to encourage the hearers to the same joyful self sacrifice.

Considering that all the arts and sciences flourished most vigorously during the period of the Persian wars, the fruits of which came to maturity in the years of peace under Pericles, it may well surprise us that the lyric art, the very one which is wont to be most closely associated with every spiritual movement, did not keep pace with the development of the other arts; and that the Wars of Liberation, so national, so just, and crowned, after grievous trials, with such amazing success, found no fuller echo in popular minstrelsy. Various circumstances combine to explain the fact.

The home of Æolian lyric poetry was more remote from the agitations of the times, and the inspiration which had called forth the poems of Alcæus and Sappho a hundred years before had burnt low. Choral lyric poetry, on the other hand, was too completely interwoven with religious worship and earlier conditions of life, it was too much accustomed to put its art at the service of the old families whose glories belonged to the past rather than the present, to find itself at home in these changed times. The Theban bard, in particular, was too deeply concerned for his native city—which had reaped nothing but shame and misery from the Wars of Liberation—and for Delphi—which had from the first looked with disfavour on the national aspirations after liberty—to appreciate dispassionately the glories of the new era, though he was too large hearted and liberal minded to refuse the victorious city of Athens its meed of admiration and praise in song. The Thebans punished Pindar for calling Athens “the pillar of Hellas”; the Athenians rewarded him, rightly esteeming his tribute a triumph of the good cause. In Sparta nothing was done to celebrate the Wars of Liberation. The Spartan constitution allowed no freedom of intellectual life, and furnished too little in the way of comfort and contentment to prove a favourable soil for poetry.

Greek Comedian

In the elegy, the oldest form of Greek lyric—so perfect an expression of the Ionic spirit in its varied measures and uses—a new form had been evolved in Ionia itself, side by side with the older one in which Theognis had expounded his party rancour and Solon his statesman-like wisdom—a lighter form which touched upon life in accents untinged by grief, the song of joyous conviviality, giving the gaiety of the banquet a higher consecration by the introduction of ethical ideas. “To drink, to jest, to bear a just mind,” sang Ion, and brought public affairs gracefully into the conversation. Dionysius the Athenian, a statesman of note in the age of Pericles, associated himself with Ion in this form of verse, and the lighter kind of elegy so appealed to the intellectual character of contemporary Athens that even Sophocles and Æschylus composed elegies of this sort. The fifth century was so rich in life and movement that these occasional verses were produced in great abundance; the epigram itself is no more than a subsidiary kind of elegiac verse. Its concise form was due to its original purpose, which was to serve as an inscription on some public monument, and it is therefore more closely connected with the great events of the time than any other kind of poetry. Simonides of Ceos was esteemed above all other Greeks as a writer of occasional verse in the best sense of the term, so much so that Sparta commissioned the Ionian poet to sing the praise of her Leonidas. With inimitable felicity he immortalised the events of the Wars of Liberation in brief pregnant epigrams inscribed on monuments of every sort, sang the praises of the fallen in elegies, and celebrated the days of Artemisium and Marathon in grand cantatas which were performed by festal choirs.

The state did what it could to advance the cause of art. It offered poets brilliant opportunities for distinguishing themselves at the celebrations held in honour of its victories, and gave prizes for the best performances. As Themistocles had been assisted by Simonides, so Cimon was assisted by the genius of Ion, who in like manner laboured to hand down his fame to posterity. Pericles was led by his own tastes as well as by political considerations to do all that lay in his power to foster the art of song in Athens. For this purpose he introduced the musical competitions at the Panathenæa, and so summoned all men of talent to vie publicly one with another. He himself was the organiser and lawgiver in this department, and settled with profound artistic knowledge the manner in which the singers and cithara-players should appear at the festivals. If in spite of all these efforts lyric poetry did not take the place we might have anticipated in the Athens of Pericles, and Simonides found no worthy successors, the principal reason must be sought in the fact that another stronger and richer voice of poetry arose, into which the lyric was merged and so lost its individual importance.