History of the Literature of Ancient Greece, Volume 1

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Baldwin and Cradock, 1840 - Greek literature - 389 pages
 

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Page 19 - Thammuz came next behind, Whose annual wound in Lebanon allured The Syrian damsels to lament his fate In amorous ditties, all a summer's day; While smooth Adonis from his native rock Ran purple to the sea, supposed with blood Of Thammuz yearly wounded...
Page 169 - Aristotle that the violet- crowned thus answered: "If thy wishes were fair and noble, and thy tongue designed not to utter what is base, shame would not cloud thine eyes, but thou wouldst freely speak thy just desires." Never was reproof more exquisitely uttered than is this in the Greek ; and if we take it for serious, as we probably should, there is all the dignity of womanhood in the reply, so that Sappho comes well out of the dialogue, however it may...
Page 230 - ... by the efforts of many sages and poets. All the Greek religious poetry treating of death and the world beyond the grave refers to the deities whose influence was supposed to be exercised in the dark region at the centre of the earth, and who were thought to have little connexion with the political and social relations of human life.
Page 244 - Fire lives the death of earth, and air lives the death of fire ; water lives the death of air, earth that of water.
Page 115 - Miiller, quoting a fragment of Mimnermus's elegy ' Nanno,' says that he was one of the colonists of Smyrna who came from Colophon, and whose ancestors at a still earlier period came from the Nelean Pylos. To the reduction of Smyrna to Halyattes, he ascribes the melancholy character of his poems.
Page 221 - Or it might be deferred until after the victor's solemn return to his native city, where it was sometimes repeated, in following years, in commemoration of his success. A celebration of this kind always had a religious character, it often began with a procession to an altar or temple, in the place of the games or in the native city ; a sacrifice, followed by a banquet, was then offered at the temple, or in the house of the victor ; and the whole solemnity concluded with the merry and boisterous revel...
Page 231 - Demeter and Cora, who was the personified expression not only of the most rapturous pleasure, but also of a deep sorrow for the miseries of human life.
Page 222 - ... expressions denoting movement, and which yet have epodes. It is possible that the epodes in the latter odes may have been sung at certain intervals when the procession was not advancing ; for an epode, according to the statements of the ancients, always required that the chorus should be at rest. But by far the greater number of the odes of Pindar were sung at the Comus, at the jovial termination of the feast; and hence Pindar himself more frequently names his odes from the Comus than from the...
Page 18 - According to the very remarkable and explicit tradition of the Argives, Linus was a youth, who, having sprung from a divine origin, grew up with the shepherds among the lambs, and was torn in pieces by wild dogs ; whence arose the ' festival of the lambs,' at which many dogs were slain.
Page 298 - Bacchic festivals, were an indispensable accompaniment to tragedy. They not only concealed the individual features of well-known actors, and enabled the spectators entirely to forget the performer in his part, but gave to his whole aspect that ideal character which the tragedy of antiquity demanded.

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