Array Anacreon - The Greatest Classics of Ancient Greece

Recorded and reviv'd on every tongue,

In continents and islands, every place

That owns the language of the Grecian race!

No purchas'd prowess of a racing steed,

But the triumphant muse, with airy speed,

Shall bear it wide and far, o'er land and main,

A glorious and unperishable strain;

A mighty prize, gratuitously won,

Fix'd as the earth, immortal as the sun!

But for all this--no kindness in return!

No token or attention or concern!

Baffled and scorn'd, you treat me like a child,

From day to day, with empty words beguil'd.

Remember! common justice, common sense

Are the best blessings which the Gods dispense:

And each man has his object; all aspire

To something which they covet and desire.

Like a fair courser, conqueror in the race,

Bound to a charioteer sordid and base,

I feel it with disdain; and many a day

Have long'd to break the curb and burst away.

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For noble minds, the worst of miseries,

Worse than old age, or wearisome disease,

Is Poverty. From Poverty to flee,

From some tall precipice into the sea,

It were a fair escape to leap below!

In Poverty, dear Kyrnus, we forego

Freedom in word and deed, body and mind;

Action and thought are fetter'd and confin'd.

Let me then fly, dear Kyrnus, 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.

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Pride and oppressive rule destroy'd the state

Of the Magnesians--Such was Smyrna's fate;

Smyrna the rich, and Colophon the great!

And ours, my friend, will follow, soon or late.

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While only I quaffed yonder secret spring,

'Twas clear and sweet to my imagining.

'Tis turbid now. Or it no more I drink,

But hang o'er other stream or river-brink.

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I envy not these sumptuous obsequies,

The stately car, the purple canopies;

Much better pleased am I, remaining here,

With cheaper equipage, and better cheer.

A couch of thorns, or an embroidered bed,

Are matters of indifference to the dead.

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I envy not these sumptuous obsequies,

The stately car, the purple canopies;

Much better pleased am I, remaining here,

With cheaper equipage, and better cheer.

A couch of thorns, or an embroidered bed,

Are matters of indifference to the dead.

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Now that in mid career, checking his force,

The bright sun pauses in his pride and force,

Let us prepare to dine; and eat and drink

The best of everything that heart can think:

And let the shapely Spartan damsel fair

Bring with a rounded arm and graceful air

Water to wash, and garlands for our hair:

In spite of all the systems and the rules

Invented and observed by sickly fools,

Let us be brave, and resolutely drink;

Not minding if the Dog-star rise or sink.

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My brain grows dizzy, whirled and overthrown

With wine: my senses are no more my own.

The ceiling and the walls are wheeling round!

But let me try! perhaps my feet are sound.

Let me retire with my remaining sense,

For fear of idle language and offence.

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The worldly-minded and the worldly wise,

In ignorance and arrogance, despise

All talents and attainments but their own;

Wisdom is their's, they think--and their's alone.

But no! the lessons of deceit and wrong,

In point of fact, are neither hard nor long:

And many know them; but a better will,

Prohibits some from practicing their skill--

Some have a taste for good, and some for ill.

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The Life and Work of Simonides of Ceos

Danaë and Her Babe Adrift

On Those Who Died at Thermopylae

The Lesson of the Leaf-Fall

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On the day, it is said, that Tisias died, there was born in Keos the next great international lyrist of Greece, SIMÔNIDES ( 556-468 B.C.). A man of wide culture and sympathies, as well as great poetic power, he was soon famous outside the circle of Ionian islands. Old Xenophanes, who lived in Italy, and died before Simônides was thirty, had already time to denounce him as a well-known man. He travelled widely -- first, it is said, to Western Greece, at the invitation of Stêsichorus's compatriots; afterwards to the court of Hipparchus in Athens; and, on his patron's assassination, to the princes of Thessaly. At one time he crossed to Asia; during the Persian War he was where he should have been -- with the patriots. He ended his life with Æschylus, Pindar, Bacchylides, Epicharmus, and others, at the court of Hiero of Syracuse. If he was celebrated at thirty, in his old age he had an international position comparable perhaps to that of Voltaire. He was essentially o+̔σóøος, the wit, the poet, the friend of all the great ones of the earth, and their equal by his sheer force of intellect. His sayings were treasured, and his poems studied with a verbal precision which suggests something like idolatry. Rumour loved to tell of his strange escape from shipwreck, and from the fall of the palace roof at Crannon, which killed most of Scopas's guests. He was certainly a man of rich and many-sided character; he was trusted by several tyrants and the Athenian democracy at the same time; he praised Hipparchus, and admired Harmodius and Aristogeiton; in his old age he was summoned to Sicily to reconcile the two most powerful princes in Greece, Gelo and Hiero. The charges of avarice which pursue his memory are probably due to his writing poems à prix firé -- not for vague, unspecified patronage, like the earlier poets. The old fashion was more friendly and romantic, but contained an element of servitude. Pindar, who laments its fall, did not attempt to recur to it; and really Simônides's plan was the nearest approach then possible to our system of the independent sale of brain-work to the public. Simônides, like the earlier lyrists, dealt chiefly in occasional poetry -- the occasion being now a festival, now a new baby, now the battle of Thermopylae -- and he seems to have introduced the 'Epinîkos,' the serious artistic poem in honour of victories at the games. Not that an 'Epinîkos' is really a bare ode on a victory -- on the victory, for instance, of Prince Skopas's mules. Such an ode would have little power of conferring immortality. It is a song in itself beautiful and interesting, into which the poet is paid to introduce a reference to the mules and their master.

Simônides wrote in many styles: we hear of Dithyrambs, Hyporchêmata, Dirges -- all these specially admired -- Parthenia, Prosodia, Paeans, Encômia, Epigrams. His religious poetry is not highly praised. If one could use the word 'perfect' of any work of art, it might apply to some of Simônides's poems on the events of the great war -- the ode on Artemisium, the epitaph on those who died at Thermopylae. They represent the extreme of Greek 'sôphrosynê' -- self-mastery, healthymindedness -- severe beauty, utterly free from exaggeration or trick -- plain speech, to be spoken in the presence of simple and eternal things: "Stranger, bear word to the Spartans that we lie here obedient to their charge." He is great, too, in the realm of human pity. The little fragment on Danaë adrift in the chest justifies the admiration of ancient critics for his 'unsurpassed pathos.' On the other hand, he is essentially an Ionian and a man of the world, one of the fathers of the Enlightenment. He has no splendour, no passion, no religious depth. The man who had these stood on the wrong side in his country's life-struggle; and Greece turned to Simônides, not to Pindar, to make the record of its heroic dead.