Myfeeble pulse forgot to play,
I fainted, sunk, and died away.Longinus then comments:
Are you not astonished at the way in which, as though they were gone from her
and belonged to another, she at one and the same time calls up soul and body,
ears, tongue, eyes, and colour; how, uniting opposites, she freezes while she burns,
is both out of her senses and in her right mind? For she is either terrified or not far
from dying. And all this is done so that not one emotion may be seen in her, but
a concourse of emotions. All such emotions as these are awakened in lovers, but
it is, as I said, the selection of them in their most extreme forms and their fusion
into a single whole that have given the poem its distinction.
(On the Sublime, 10)Another ancient critic, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, cites a poem of Sappho to exem-
plify a polished style of composition where there is metrical harmony, euphonious
diction and a flowing continuity (On Literary Composition, 23).The following is an
English Sapphic based on a surviving fragment of the Greek poet herself:
Bough with apples laden around me whisper
Cool the waters trickle among the branches;
And I listen, till a languor
Stealeth upon me.
(Percy Osborn, 1919)Alcaeus wrote hymns to the gods, war songs, political poems, love poems, encomia
and drinking songs. Only a little of the work of these early lyric poets survives, mostly
in the form of fragments. Many of these are preserved on papyrus as illustrated in the
fragment of Alcaeus (fig. 38).
The Dorian choral lyric involving dancing developed at Sparta and charac-
teristically had a triadic structure involving strophe, antistophe and epode (see p. 146).
These grander choral lyrics were invariably more public in character. There are
many kinds of choral lyric, e.g. the hymeneal, the hymn, the dithyramb in honour of
Dionysus, the threnody, the encomium. The Theban poet Pindar (c. 518–c.466), who
used the Doric dialect and form, wrote in all these kinds, but only his epinicianor
triumphal odes celebrating the victories of competitors in the Greek games
(Olympian, Pythian, Isthmian and Nemean) survive in complete form, mostly having
a triadic structure. His odes are heroic in tone, grandiloquent in expression and
digressive in structure with mythical illustration; they celebrate aristocratic values. In
142 THE GREEKS