EPIC AND LYRIC POETRY OF THE ATTIC PERIOD 269

philosopher Aristotle. But the most important lyrics of this period were the dithyrambs and nomes.

Dithyrambs and nomes.

Dithyrambic performances were given at Athens after the development of the drama as before, but the music became more important than the words, the sound than the sense. Melanippides the elder, a contemporary of Pindar, born at Melos about 520 B. C., began this movement by substituting musical interludes for the antistrophes of the dithyrambs. His grandson Melanippides the younger, who died at the court of the Macedonian king Perdiccas in the time of the Peloponnesian War, made further innovations. Fragments of his Danaïdes, Marsyas, and Persephone are preserved. Cinesias of Athens, son of the musician Meles, is ridiculed by Aristophanes and blamed by other and more serious writers for innovations in the dithyramb which tended to make its words less important than the music and dancing. The nome passed through changes similar to those of the dithyramb. The chief innovator in this branch was Phrynis of Mytilene, who won the prize at the Panathenaic festival in 412 B. C. He appears to have made changes in music and perhaps in versification, but none of his work is preserved. Timotheus of Miletus was born in 447 and died in 357 B. C. He passed from city to city competing for the prizes of poetry. He composed nomes for lyre accompaniment, forming eighteen or nineteen books aggregating eight thousand lines, sixty-seven procemia, twenty-one hymns, eighteen dithyrambs, and various other less important poems. His nomes were especially famous, but as they were sung by a chorus, they probably differed little from dithyrambs. He is said to have made music more effeminate, but the same thing is said of nearly all the poets of this period, and we can not tell what it means. His great reputation shows that his poems had merits which the existing fragments, without the musical accompaniment, do not allow us to appreciate. The same may be said of his

chief rival, Philoxenus of Cythera, who was born in 435 and died at Ephesus in 380 B. C. He was a child when the inhabitants of Cythera were reduced to slavery by the Lacedæmonians, and was bought first by a Lacedæmonian, then by the Athenian Melanippides, from whom he learned the art of poetry. In the height of his fame he was called to Syracuse by Dionysius the elder, but was for some reason obliged to flee to Tarentum, where he wrote the Cyclops to insult the tyrant. He composed twenty-four dithyrambs and numerous other poems.

Other poets of the Attic period were Cydias, Telestes, Polyidus, and Castorion. To these should be added the names of many who wrote lyric poetry not as a profession, but in the intervals of other occupations-such are Timocreon of Rhodes, Ion of Chios, Diagoras of Melos, Sophocles, Cercidas of Megalopolis, and Socrates, and the list could be almost indefinitely extended. But enough has been said to show that poetry in all its forms continued to be cultivated throughout the Attic period.

CHAPTER XXIV

ATTIC PROSE-THUCYDIDES

Rhetoric-The State of the Athenians-Thucydides, about 465 to about 400 B. C.-His life-His history of the Peloponnesian War-His truth and accuracy-His style and composition.

THE fifth century, which witnessed the development of the drama, saw also the rise of Attic prose. In all its forms this was much influenced by oratory and

Rhetorical element in Attic prose.

rhetoric, so that it may almost be said to have developed from the speeches delivered before the popular assembly and the Heliastic courts, and the earliest great work of Attic prose, the history of Thucydides, shows on every page the influence of the orator and rhetorician Antiphon; but that we may treat each branch of prose literature consecutively, it may be best to postpone the discussion of Antiphon until after the historical and philosophical writings of the Attic period have been discussed.

The essay on

of the Athenians.

The earliest example of Attic prose is apparently an essay on The State of the Athenians, preserved among the writings of Xenophon, but certainly not by The State him. Perhaps it is the work of Critias; certainly it was written not far from 425 B. C. The style is already clear and lucid. It shows the influence of rhetoric in the balancing of sentences, but it also reminds one of the Socratic dialogues. The writer was evidently trained in public speaking, but rather in practical pleading than in theoretical rhetoric. He was

an aristocrat, and criticizes the government of Athens with great severity and not without a certain dry humor.

The great prose work of the fifth century is the history of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides, son of Olorus, of the Attic deme of Halimus. He was descended

Thucydides. from Olorus, a Thracian chief, whose daughter, Hegesipyle, was the wife of Miltiades, and in addition to this distinguished relationship he was connected with the family of Pisistratus. The date of his birth is unknown. He says at the beginning of his work:1 "Thucydides, an Athenian, wrote the history of the war in which the Peloponnesians and the Athenians fought against one another. He began to write when they first took up arms, believing that it would be great and memorable above any previous. war." And again he says, speaking of the war:2 “I lived through the whole of it, and was of mature years and judgment, and I took great pains to make out the exact truth." He was made general in 424 B. C., and must therefore have been at least thirty years old at that time, but his expressions about himself seem to imply that he was thirty or forty years old when the war began. His birth may therefore be placed between 470 and 460 B. C. The date of his death is also unknown, but he lived as late as 403 and died before 396. His tomb was shown in the family burial place of Cimon. The following details of his life are known: In 430 or 429 he was attacked by the plague; in 424 he was made general and put in command of the fleet operating on the coast of Thrace, but owing to his failure to prevent the capture of Amphipolis was accused of treason. After this he lived in banishment until he was recalled in 403, spending his time in part at least among the Peloponnesians, and in this way gathering material for his history. Whether he spent any considerable part of the time on his estates at Scapte Hyle, in Thrace, is doubtful, as that region was under Athenian rule. According 2 V, 26; Jowett's translation.

1 I, 1; Jowett's translation.

to one account he was murdered immediately after his return to Athens, while another authority says that he died in Thrace.

The history not finished.

The only work of Thucydides is the history of the Peloponnesian War, and that was never completed, but breaks off in the middle of the year 411 B. C., although it is evident that some parts of it were written after the close of the war. The last of the eight books into which the work was divided by the Alexandrian editors is evidently not finished, and some other parts of the work, especially in the fifth book, never received the last careful revision of the author, who must have died in the midst of his labors. No part of the work was finished and published before the end of the Peloponnesian War, but Thucydides collected his material as promptly as possible, and worked much of it up into a connected narrative long before the war was over, leaving only the final revision to be made after the close of the war, and the greater part of the work as it has come down to us received this final revision. How much material for the history of the last years of the war had been collected when Thucydides died we do not know.

The character of the history.

Thucydides differs from his predecessors in the choice of his subject, for he is the first historian to write the history of events which he himself has seen. In a brief introduction (Book I, 1-21) he tells of the early history of Greece, partly to show why the Peloponnesian War seems to him most important; he gives (Book I, 89-118) an admirable account of the history of Athens during the fifty years since the Persian wars, which is necessary as an explanation of the causes of the Peloponnesian War; he describes the realm of the Odrysians in Thrace (Book II, 96-101); and makes us acquainted with the position and previous history of Sicily (Book VI, 1-5); but these can hardly be called digressions, as they are necessary for the proper understanding of the history.