a sluggish imagination. And, quite apart from that, Wilamowitz is not without warrant, in holding that these two hundred and fifty verses of Timotheos are historically worth a hundredfold more than as many new verses of Pindar or Sophocles, no matter how inferior in intrinsic value. On the other hand, some good Hellenists-regarding the Pindaric rule that "each ungodded thing is none the worse for being quenched in silence" might be glad to give our poet another millennial lease of sleep. Certainly, no Hellenic god in his sober spells could have taken pure delight in a performance so un-Hellenic as The Persians, -as un-Hellenic, at first blush, as the "Artimis by Ephesus," on whom our sputtering Phrygian relies. Still, as no artist can pass quite unheeded that outlandish alabaster-bronze Diana of the Ephesians in the Naples Museum, so no student of literature can quite shut his eyes to a work, however unclassical, of this master-singer of his time. Cer In that conviction, I have had the temerity in the face of the editor princeps, who declares it untranslatable — to undertake a transcript of The Persians, and, indeed, to try to hit off" the very turn of each phrase in as Greek a fashion as English will bear." How much of that fashion English will bear, now that the man in the street is our schoolmaster, it may not be easy to measure. tainly, were he to-day asked for glosses on his great Pindaric ode, Gray could hardly plead again "too much respect for the understanding of his readers to take such a liberty." At all events, the present reader will hardly resent the liberty taken in some slight prolegomena, intended mainly to clear his way through a jungle of metaphor, and to set him in touch with the old singer and his audience. If Timotheos was "the detestation of the old Athens, the darling of the new," we must remember that he was not Athenian born. "The town that nursed him," as he tells us in The Persians, was Mile from the very start I would have somewhat of an Oriental cast even when the place ceased for a while to be a Persian outpost under the Peace of Kallias, concluded about the time of the poet's birth (circa 450 B. c.). And we know what strange fruits its proper breeding could yield, — fruits which Athens was even then proving, with no great relish, in the person of Aspasia. To the young Milesian sane fifth-century Athens would be but a slow old town; and, when he bestirred him to set the pace anew, no wonder she detested him. In The Persians, indeed, the apology for his art may impress the reader as a bit abject, but then he is pleading to a Spartan bench. Contrast this frank avowal (Fragment 12), doubtless flung in the face of Athenian censors, who hardly went with Euripides in hailing Timotheos as the poet of the future : Of the new Muse's quality, the extant fragments some thirty lines all told had left us in small doubt. Notably, the first from the Hymn to Artemis, which Ephesian taste rated at a thousand gold pieces, and the Ephesian budget provided for accordingly, but which must have set Athenian teeth on edge. Its sole fragment is just a string of epithets, θυιάδα φοιβάδα μαινάδα λυσσάδα (as who should say, antical frantical mantical rant-ical ! ), singularly suggestive of the Naples enormity; and we can but sympathize with lank old Kinesias, something of a "song-twister" himself, who, on the poet's repeating them at Athens, rose in the theatre and sang out, "May you get a daughter of your own like that!" In one instance, happily, we can confront the new Muse with the old, and measure the celestial diameter that divides them; for we have the Milesian's "Wine of Ismaros" and its Homeric original. Here is the good old vintage (Odyssey ix, 208 f.): "Oft as they drank that red wine honey-sweet, One cup he'd fill and then on twenty parts of water Pour it, and a sweet smell from the mixer smelled And marvellous. Then, truly, 't were no pleasure to refrain." And here is the Milesian brew (Fragment 3): "He filled one ivy-cup of the dark ambrosial drop, with foam a-bubbling, and that on twenty measures poured and blended Bacchus' blood with Nymphs' fresh-flowing tears." Shades of Byron and his "Chinese nymph of tears, green tea!" The ratio is Homeric, but the bouquet is fled; and for honest wine and water who could choose this drench of blood and tears! From these bits we get a fair foretaste of the longer poem. Timotheos is nothing if not metaphorical. He cannot call a spade a spade. It is no plain javelin, but Ares himself, whose ether-borne body we see shot from men's hands, and lighting on limbs (of ships?), where it still quivers; the sword is a cutthroat minister ("ye murthering ministers "); and hors de combat is orphaned of battles. His ships have no gunwales and rowlocks, but mouths and teeth, which are, to be sure, the children of the mouth; no oars, but hands or feet, now fir-tree hands, and now long-neck - floating mountaingrown feet; no hulls, but limbs; no ram, but an iron skull or a side-assailing flash. They are not simply stripped of their oars, they are disglorified," and, in lieu of keeling over, they just "toss up their manes." Quite the caper, this, for a sea-horse, and even Pindar sings "swift Argo's bridle," and makes Viking Poseidon Master of the Horse (Traрxos), as 66 he was, in fact, the primal Horseman; or it may be a concession to the " emerald-haired sea," which swallows many a wretch from "Mysia's tree-maned glens" before the "ship-drops" incarnadine it. As these ship-drops may be either flying brands or spurts of blood, my "ships' red rain" follows the poet in leaving the reader his choice. The bay of Salamis is "Amphitrite's fish-enwreathed marble-girt bosom ;" and to one who has watched the play of a glancing school of many-tinted fishes that were no bad posy for the sea-dame's breast. From his throne on Ægaleos the Great King "hems in with errant eyes " these floating plains (one thinks of the Lotus-Eaters' "wandering fields of barren foam "), — that is to say, he sweeps the battle scene with imperious glance. But he has already built a solid roof o'er floating Helle," and "yoked down her haughty neck in a hemp-bound collar," — both variations on the familiar bridge of boats. Yet this protean sea fairly outdoes herself, when upon the Phrygian landlubber she rains" a foaming flood unbacchic," and plumps into not his stomach, but his bread-basket (Tpópμov ayyos). But this sea-water cure is sui generis ; and we can almost hear the roar of the groundlings, to whom, here and again flagrantly in the broken Greek of the Kelainæan, the poet is playing. 66 Still, there are redeeming touches: "the woven beauty of the limbs; ""Fire's lurid sprite with its fierce body burning up" the flower of Persia's youth; and "the Mountain-Mother's dark-leaf-kirtled queenly knees" and "fair-elbowed arms." There we can yet see, as the wretched suppliant saw in his mind's eye, the sculptured form of his far-away Phrygian goddess, with her embroidered drapery, like that of the kindred Mistress of Lykasoura now in the Athens Museum, and her bare forearms gleaming white, as we know them in many an old Greek marble. But we must not anticipate too much, needful as these glosses are to the apprehension of a poet who has so far abused the coining privilege and overworked the metaphor that the "dressing" bids fair to oust the dinner. Still, we may not forget that these multiple Massilian compounds, with their ringing numbers, were addressed not so much to the understanding as to the ear. It is no longer, as in the great Lyric Age," music married to immortal verse," but verse harnessed in the triumphal car of music. The Queen of the Lyre is become its creature, the poet lost in the composer; and The Persians is an opera. But only its bare words have come down to us; for the old Greek who fell on sleep at Busiris was no singer, and so had not provided himself with the score. Justly to appreciate it, we must put ourselves in the place of its first hearers: we must take our seats in the great gathering of the twelve Ionian cities at Poseidon's sacred grove on the north slope of Mount Mykale in or about the year 396 before Christ.1 On this bold headland one vividly recalls that well-aimed blow at Persian power delivered here not so many years past, and one may even fancy that the Milesian singer in his new Persians is to celebrate that day and this scene. But not so. It is the scene and day of Salamis, already immortalized by a greater singer in a greater Persians, by a poet who was there, and who is telling the story to his comrades in the Athenian theatre, whose upper benches, at least, look out on the strait where he and they pulled stroke for stroke, and fought shoulder to shoulder, only eight years before. If there be on Mykale to-day a centenarian who was in that fight and at that play, and who is looking for somewhat to stir his old Athe 1 Such, with good reason, Wilamowitz takes to be the time, place, and occasion of bringing out the piece. 2 Anyway, it was so with Philopomen some two centuries later, when, at the head of the stalwart, well set-up men whom he had nian blood, he is doomed to sore disillusion. For Athens the times are out of joint, and Sparta is in the saddle, ay, in the front seats here at the Panionia. Even the Persian has more to do him reverence now than the City, the Persian who in three short years is again to sit as satrap in Miletus itself, while Konon restores the Long Walls with the King's gold. And so in all our opera, a thinly veiled plea for an aggressive Eastern policy under Sparta's lead, we do not catch the name of Athens. But then it is all a story without a name, even Salamis and Xerxes are nameless; and, indeed, the only persons named in the body of the piece are deities. How unlike our Eschylus's bristling bead-roll of Iranian grandees, his stately muster of the streams and isles of Hellas! As the musician-poet enters in his singing robes, with the garland on his brow, and, smiting the lyre, leads off in the noble hexameter, "Liberty's great and glorious jewel for Hellas Timotheos has caught the cue; and, having once set his battle in array, he passes to a series of scenes well chosen to heighten Hellenic scorn without too far outraging Hellenic taste. There is, to begin with, the Phrygian landlubber afloat and — with all comic circumstance- swallowing the sea, which takes his tongue-lashing, and then swallows him in turn. Then the shivering wretches on the rocks, the pathos of whose appeal to their far-off fatherland and the Phrygian goddess strikes a true tragic note. Again, to split the ears of the groundlings, another Phrygian, haled by the hair of his head, grovels at his captor's knees, and in painfully broken Greek sues for life, in which suit a chorus of Asiatics join, as in a fugue. And, finally, we look upon the utter rout, and listen to the Great King's simple and not undignified lament. If we have not perused a battle history, we have witnessed a battle drama; and we feel how fully the poet must have placed the scenes before his own eyes, and acted the parts in his own mind, before he could bring them, thus throbbing, home to us. He does not stay to celebrate the victory; but, with brief allusion to trophy, pæan, and dance, he drops the theme. Indeed, to compare slight things with sublime, he has just touched the theme "in points of light," as the Theban singer signals us from peak to peak in his Quest of the Golden Fleece.1 It remains to seal the performance with the poet's apology addressed to the Spartan who has flouted him and his muse, but who should now be mollified by the subtle flattery of his new song. It is a rather pedestrian "Progress of Poesy" first, Orpheus; next, your own Terpander; now, Timotheos, come not to pervert, but to perfect. And then, with his best bow to mother Miletus and the Panionian community, invoking on their heads Apollo's gift of Peace, with her mate Good Government, 1 Pindar's Fourth Pythian. the singer quits the thymele (not Dionysos' altar, here, but Poseidon's), leaving us content with the sweet and insinuating music of his eleven strings, even if somewhat surfeited with his superfine metaphors and his coarse fun. All but our old Athenian : now that he has assisted at the great Persians and the small, he must be taking the true measure of his century as he muses grimly on the descent from Eschylus to Timotheos; from Salamis to Egospotami; from that "Radiant, violet-crowned, exalted in song, to the flute-girl frolic in which the starved and stricken City has but lately seen those walls pulled down. And it is a son of Miletus, her eldest and best loved daughter, who can sing the song of Salamis without once remembering that Athens was! Between this lyre and those flutes our veteran surely has his fill of a music fit "to untune the sky." But it is high time to let the poet speak for himself, albeit in broken numbers. With all the resources of free coinage, wherein German asks little or no odds of Greek, Wilamowitz pronounces The Persians untranslatable; and the reader may presently agree with him. But what follows is Timotheos unadulterated, with his metaphors gone mad, his long, loose-jointed epithets, his dithyrambic diction, half riddle, half jargon, - in short, treading his own measure, so far as I dare let him, without leaving the reader quite in the dark. Something has been sacrificed to keep the prevailing iambic movement, while quite neglecting the lyric variations; for the transcript makes no claim to be anything but modulated prose, and the lining is merely for convenience in referring to the Greek text. Of the first half of the poem, we have only the three random lines already quoted which it may be well to reset in their probable connection. The first col umn of the papyrus yields hardly one complete word, to say nothing of connected sense. In the second, though somewhat mutilated, the drift is clear. The battle is on, the ram is rampant. We get a glimpse of ships, "with cornicelanced frame of teeth set round for the feet," that is to say, red gunwales, with white rowlocks for the oars; and of rams, "with arched heads beset, that sweep aside the fir-tree hands." And now, from verse 8 of the editio princeps, we may take the plunge with the poet. 20 And if upon the sides the lightning leapt, with sweep of quick-stroke pine the ships bore back again. And some, with timbers riven all apart, laid bare their linen-girthed ribs; some, 'neath the plunging leaden shaft, tossed up their manes and sank; and some on beam-ends lay, of all their bravery shorn by the iron skull. Now, like to Fire, man-quelling Ares loop-enleashèd shot from hands and fell on limbs, through all his ether - coursing frame a-quiver still. 90 thou oestrus-maddened ancient hate and fickle leman of the whelming wind!" He said, with spent breath strangling, and the loathly gorge outcast, withal upbelching at the mouth the deep-sea brine. Anon, in flight back sped the Persian host barbaric in hot haste. And swirl on swirl of galleys crashed; and out of hand they flung the long lithe-plying highland feet o' the ship, while from ship's mouth, outleapt its marble-gleaming offspring in the shock. |