The Oxford History Of The Classical World

(Marvins-Underground-K-12) #1
we enjoy, at the hands of the gods knowing not evil days
nor good. But beside us there stand the black spirits of Death,
one of them holding an end in age with its dreadful pain
and the other in death: but of youth only a short time lives
the fruit - for as long as the sun spreads itself over the plain.

(fr. 2. 1-8)


Such themes suited symposia, but disclose little about Mimnermus' society at large. Even in warlike
Sparta, after all, where Tyrtaeus demonstrates elegy's popularity, elegies praised drinking; and the
Athenian lawgiver Solon's songs enthused over love and the good life (frs. 23, 25, 26). However, Solon's
poems also exemplify lengthy treatment of political issues - doubtless common topics in after-dinner
conversation, and so not surprising candidates for song in the same setting. A fanciful anecdote has Solon
recite in the agora a 100-line elegy urging the Athenians to recapture Salamis; but, like other political
fragments, this song is simply a particular form of elegy's reflective and exhortatory mode. Another (fr.
13) is our longest early elegy to survive. In its seventy-six lines (probably a complete poem) Solon prays
for wealth - but justly acquired, for Zeus punishes evil - shifts to the emptiness of man's hopes, slides into
a catalogue of different human activities, then returns to actions' uncertain outcome - uncertain save that
greed attracts god-sent ruin. Despite loose construction the poem has power, momentum, and several
striking images. Solon's iambics, apparently all political, exploit less poetic vocabulary, but here too is a
moving personification of 'Black Earth, greatest mother of the Olympian gods' (fr. 36. 5-6), called to
witness how Solon freed her, the soil of Attica, by abolishing serfdom. Note too that in such poems (fr.
33) Solon, like Archilochus, made others speak.


Alone of early elegiac and melic poets Theognis of Megara (C. 540 BC) has had some poetry transmitted
in a continuous manuscript tradition. Less fortunately for him, the 1,400 or so lines there ascribed to him
are a mixture of his and others' elegies; and snippets, as naturally in an anthology, outnumber complete
songs. Nevertheless the collection is priceless. First, much of Theognis' work is identifiable by being
addressed to his boy-friend Cyrnus: we hear a sententious oligarch, bitter at his class's loss of power and
distrusting all about him. Some songs are distinguished, notably 237-54 (probably complete), confidently
promising Cyrnus poetic immortality, only to conclude:


And yet I receive from you not even a little respect.
But, as if I were a small boy, you deceive me with tales.

Secondly, that Theognis' platitudes on friendship, wine, or wealth became the core of a song-book
exposes the general level of singing and the preferred themes of symposia c. 500 B.C. Finally, several
passages overlap quotations elsewhere from other elegists, augmenting their known work.


Although some fifth-century pieces survive, by then elegy, like aristocratic symposia, is in decline; by the
fourth century it is dead. Iambic poetry also disappears, its metres annexed by Attic drama. Even for its
acme iambic fragments are too sparse to allow confident reconstruction of the genre. Some poets other
than Archilochus and Solon stand out. Semonides, who led a Samian colony to Amorgos C. 630 BC,

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