Chapter X: Front Matter (10)

The lyric has the function of revealing, in terms of pure art, the secrets of the inner life, its hopes, its fantastic joys, its sorrows, its delirium. It is easier to exclude the dramatic species from lyric than to banish the epic. There are large sections of drama which it is inconceivable should be set to music, or sung, or even given in recitative. The tragedies of Racine, for example, are composed of the purest poetry, but they are essentially non-lyrical, although lyrical portions are here and there attached to them. The intensity of feeling and the melody of verse in _Othello_ does not make that work an example of lyrical poetry, and this is even more acutely true of _Le Misanthrope_, which is, nevertheless, a poem. The tendency of modern drama is to divide itself further and further from lyric, but in early ages the two kinds were indissoluble. Tragedy was goat-song, and the earliest specimens of it were mainly composed of choruses. As Prof. G. G. Murray says, in the _Suppliants_ of Aeschylus, the characters "are singing for two-thirds of the play," accompanied by tumultuous music. This primitive feature has gradually been worn away; the chorus grew less and less prominent, and disappeared; the very verse-ornament of drama tends to vanish, and we have plays essentially so poetical as those of Ibsen and Maeterlinck written from end to end in bare prose.

To return again to Greece, there was an early distinction, soon accentuated, between the poetry chanted by a choir of singers, and the song which expressed the sentiments of a single poet. The latter, the [Greek: melos] or song proper, had reached a height of technical perfection in "the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung," as early as the 7th century B.C. That poetess, and her contemporary Alcaeus, divide the laurels of the pure Greek song of Dorian inspiration. By their side, and later, flourished the great poets who set words to music for choirs, Alcman, Arion, Stesichorus, Simonides and Ibycus, who lead us at the close of the 5th century to Bacchylides and Pindar, in whom the magnificent tradition of the dithyrambic odes reached its highest splendour of development. The practice of Pindar and Sappho, we may say, has directed the course of lyrical poetry ever since, and will, unquestionably, continue to do so. They discovered how, with the maximum of art, to pour forth strains of personal magic and music, whether in a public or a private way. The ecstasy, the uplifted magnificence, of lyrical poetry could go no higher than it did in the unmatched harmonies of these old Greek poets, but it could fill a much wider field and be expressed with vastly greater variety. It did so in their own age. The gnomic verses of Theognis were certainly sung; so were the satires of Archilochus and the romantic reveries of Mimnermus.

At the Renaissance, when the traditions of ancient life were taken up eagerly, and hastily comprehended, it was thought proper to divide poetry into a diversity of classes. The earliest English critic who enters into a discussion of the laws of prosody, William Webbe, lays it down, in 1586, that in verse "the most usual kinds are four, the heroic, elegiac, iambic and lyric." Similar confusion of terms was common among the critics of the 15th and 16th centuries, and led to considerable error. It is plain that a border ballad is heroic, and may yet be lyrical; here the word "heroic" stands for "epic." It is plain that whether a poem is lyrical or not had nothing to do with the question whether it is composed in an iambic measure. Finally, it is undoubted that the early Greek "elegies" were sung to an accompaniment on the flute, whether they were warlike, like those of Tyrtaeus, or philosophical and amatory like those of Theognis. But (see ELEGY) the present significance of "elegy," and this has been the case ever since late classical times, is funereal; in modern parlance an elegy is a dirge. Whether the great Alexandrian dirges, like those of Bion and of Moschus, on which our elegiacal tradition is founded, were actually sung to an accompaniment or not may be doubted; they seem too long, too elaborate, and too ornate for that. But, at any rate, they were composed on the convention that they would be sung, and it is conceivable that music might have been wedded to the most complex of these Alexandrian elegies. Accordingly, although _Lycidas_ and _Adonais_ are not habitually "set to music," there is no reason why they should not be so set, and their rounded and limited although extensive form links them with the song, not with the epic. There are many odes of Swinburne's for which it would be more difficult to write music than for his _Ave atque Vale_. In fact, in spite of its solemn and lugubrious regularity, the formal elegy or dirge is no more nor less than an ode, and is therefore entirely lyrical.

More difficulty is met with in the case of the sonnet, for although no piece of verse, when it is inspired by subjective passion, fits more closely with Hegel's definition of what lyrical poetry should be, yet the rhythmical complication of the sonnet, and its rigorous uniformity, seem particularly ill-fitted to interpretation on a lyre. When F. M. degli Azzi put the book of Genesis (1700) into sonnets, and Isaac de Benserade the _Metamorphoses_ of Ovid (1676) into rondeaux, these eccentric and laborious versifiers produced what was epical rather than lyrical poetry, if poetry it was at all. But the sonnet as Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Petrarch used it was a cry from the heart, a subjective confession, and although there is perhaps no evidence that a sonnet was ever set to music with success, yet there is no reason why that might not be done without destroying its sonnet-character.

Jouffroy was perhaps the first aesthetician to see quite clearly that lyrical poetry is, really, nothing more than another name for poetry itself, that it includes all the personal and enthusiastic part of what lives and breathes in the art of verse, so that the divisions of pedantic criticism are of no real avail to us in its consideration. We recognize a narrative or epical poetry; we recognize drama; in both of these, when the individual inspiration is strong, there is much that trembles on the verge of the lyrical. But outside what is pure epic and pure drama, all, or almost all, is lyrical. We say almost all, because the difficulty arises of knowing where to place descriptive and didactic poetry. The _Seasons_ of Thomson, for instance, a poem of high merit and lasting importance in the history of literature--where is that to be placed? What is to be said of the _Essay on Man_? In primitive times, the former would have been classed under epic, the second would have been composed in the supple iambic trimeter which so closely resembled daily speech, and would not have been sharply distinguished from prose. Perhaps this classification would still serve, were it not for the element of versification, which makes a sharp line of demarcation between poetic art and prose. This complexity of form, rhythmical and stanzaic, takes much of the place which was taken in antiquity by such music as Terpander is supposed to have supplied. In a perfect lyric by a modern writer the instrument is the metrical form, to which the words have to adapt themselves. There is perhaps no writer who has ever lived in whose work this phenomenon may be more fruitfully studied than it may be in the songs and lyrics of Shelley. The temper of such pieces as "Arethusa" and "The Cloud" is indicated by a form hardly more ambitious than a guitar; Hellas is full of passages which suggest the harp; in his songs Shelley touches the lute or viol de gamba, while in the great odes to the "West Wind" and to "Liberty" we listen to a verse-form which reminds us by its volume of the organ itself. On the whole subject of the nature of lyric poetry no commentary can be more useful to the student than an examination of the lyrics of Shelley in relation to those of the songwriters of ancient Greece.

See Hegel, _Die Phänomenologie des Geistes_ (1807); T. S. Jouffroy,
_Cours d'esthétique_ (1843); W. Christ, _Metrik der Griechen und
Römer_, 2te. Aufl. (1879). (E. G.)

LYSANDER (Gr. [Greek: Lysandros]), son of Aristocritus, Spartan admiral and diplomatist. Aelian (_Var. Hist._ xii. 43) and Phylarchus (_ap._ Athen. vi. 271 e) say that he was a _mothax_, i.e. the son of a helot mother (see HELOTS), but this tradition is at least doubtful; according to Plutarch he was a Heraclid, though not of either royal family. We do not know how he rose to eminence: he first appears as admiral of the Spartan navy in 407 B.C. The story of his influence with Cyrus the Younger, his naval victory off Notium, his quarrel with his successor Callicratidas in 406, his appointment as [Greek: epistoleus] in 405, his decisive victory at Aegospotami, and his share in the siege and capitulation of Athens belong to the history of the Peloponnesian War (q.v.). By 404 he was the most powerful man in the Greek world and set about completing the task of building up a Spartan empire in which he should be supreme in fact if not in name. Everywhere democracies were replaced by oligarchies directed by bodies of ten men (decarchies, [Greek: dekarchiai]) under the control of Spartan governors (harmosts, [Greek: harmostai]). But Lysander's boundless influence and ambition, and the superhuman honours paid him, roused the jealousy of the kings and the ephors, and, on being accused by the Persian satrap Pharnabazus, he was recalled to Sparta. Soon afterwards he was sent to Athens with an army to aid the oligarchs, but Pausanias, one of the kings, followed him and brought about a restoration of democracy. On the death of Agis II., Lysander secured the succession of Agesilaus (q.v.), whom he hoped to find amenable to his influence. But in this he was disappointed. Though chosen to accompany the king to Asia as one of his thirty advisers ([Greek: symbouloi]), he was kept inactive and his influence was broken by studied affronts, and finally he was sent at his own request as envoy to the Hellespont. He soon returned to Sparta to mature plans for overthrowing the hereditary kingship and substituting an elective monarchy open to all Heraclids, or even, according to another version, to all Spartiates. But his alleged attempts to bribe the oracles were fruitless, and his schemes were cut short by the outbreak of war with Thebes in 395. Lysander invaded Boeotia from the west, receiving the submission of Orchomenus and sacking Lebadea, but the enemy intercepted his despatch to Pausanias, who had meanwhile entered Boeotia from the south, containing plans for a joint attack upon Haliartus. The town was at once strongly garrisoned, and when Lysander marched against it he was defeated and slain. He was buried in the territory of Panopeus, the nearest Phocian city. An able commander and an adroit diplomatist, Lysander was fired by the ambition to make Sparta supreme in Greece and himself in Sparta. To this end he shrank from no treachery or cruelty; yet, like Agesilaus, he was totally free from the characteristic Spartan vice of avarice, and died, as he had lived, a poor man.

See the biographies by Plutarch and Nepos; Xen. _Hellenica_, i. 5-iii.
5; Diod. Sic. xiii. 70 sqq., 104 sqq., xiv. 3, 10, 13, 81; Lysias xii.
60 sqq.; Justin v. 5-7; Polyaenus i. 45, vii. 19; Pausanias iii., ix.
32, 5-10, x. 9, 7-11; C. A. Gehlert, _Vita Lysandri_ (Bautzen, 1874);
W. Vischer, _Alkibiades und Lysandros_ (Basel, 1845); O. H. J.
Nitzsch, _De Lysandro_ (Bonn, 1847); and the Greek histories in
general. (M. N. T.)

LYSANIAS, tetrarch of Abilene (see ABILA), according to Luke iii. 1, in the time of John the Baptist. The only Lysanias mentioned in profane history as exercising authority in this district was executed in 36 B.C. by M. Antonius (Mark Antony). This Lysanias was the son of Ptolemy Mennaeus, the ruler of an independent state, of which Abilene formed only a small portion. According to Josephus (_Ant._ xix. 5, 1) the emperor Claudius in A.D. 42 confirmed Agrippa I. in the possession of "Abila of Lysanias" already bestowed upon him by Caligula, elsewhere described as "Abila, which had formed the tetrarchy of Lysanias." It is argued that this cannot refer to the Lysanias executed by M. Antonius, since his paternal inheritance, even allowing for some curtailment by Pompey, must have been of far greater extent. It is therefore assumed by some authorities that the Lysanias in Luke (A.D. 28-29) is a younger Lysanias, tetrarch of Abilene only, one of the districts into which the original kingdom was split up after the death of Lysanias I. This younger Lysanias may have been a son of the latter, and identical with, or the father of, the Claudian Lysanias. On the other hand, Josephus knows nothing of a younger Lysanias, and it is suggested by others that he really does refer to Lysanias I. The explanation given by M. Krenkel (_Josephus und Lucas_, Leipzig, 1894, p. 97) is that Josephus does not mean to imply that Abila was the only possession of Lysanias, and that he calls it the tetrarchy or kingdom of Lysanias because it was the last remnant of the domain of Lysanias which remained under direct Roman administration until the time of Agrippa. The expression was borrowed from Josephus by Luke, who wrongly imagined that Lysanias I. had ruled almost up to the time of the bestowal of his tetrarchy upon Agrippa, and therefore to the days of John the Baptist. Two inscriptions are adduced as evidence for the existence of a younger Lysanias--Bockh, _C.I.G._ 4521 and 4523. The former is inconclusive, and in the latter the reading [Greek: Ans[aniou]] is entirely conjectural; the name might equally well be Lysimachus or Lysias.

See E. Schürer, _Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes_ (3rd ed., 1901), i.
p. 712; and (especially on the inscriptional evidence) E. Renan,
"Mémoire sur la dynastie des Lysanias d'Abilene" in _Mémoires de
l'institut imperial de France_ (xxvi., 1870); also P. W. Schmiedel in
the _Encyclopaedia Biblica_, s.v.

LYSIAS, Attic orator, was born, according to Dionysius of Halicarnassus and the author of the life ascribed to Plutarch, in 459 B.C. This date was evidently obtained by reckoning back from the foundation of Thurii (444 B.C.), since there was a tradition that Lysias had gone thither at the age of fifteen. Modern critics would place his birth later,--between 444 and 436 B.C.,--because, in Plato's _Republic_, of which the scene is laid about 430 B.C., Cephalus, the father of Lysias, is among the _dramatis personae_, and the emigration of Lysias to Thurii was said to have followed his father's death. The latter statement, however, rests only on the Plutarchic life; nor can Plato's dialogue be safely urged as a minutely accurate authority. The higher date assigned by the ancient writers agrees better with the tradition that Lysias reached, or passed, the age of eighty.[1] Cephalus, his father, was a native of Syracuse, and on the invitation of Pericles had settled at Athens. The opening scene of Plato's _Republic_ is laid at the house of his eldest son, Polemarchus, in Peiraeus. The tone of the picture warrants the inference that the Sicilian family were well known to Plato, and that their houses must often have been hospitable to such gatherings.

At Thurii, the colony newly planted on the Tarentine Gulf (see PERICLES), the boy may have seen Herodotus, now a man in middle life, and a friendship may have grown up between them. There, too, Lysias is said to have commenced his studies in rhetoric--doubtless under a master of the Sicilian school--possibly, as tradition said, under Tisias, the pupil of Corax, whose name is associated with the first attempt to formulate rhetoric as an art. In 413 B.C. the Athenian armament in Sicily was annihilated. The desire to link famous names is illustrated by the ancient ascription to Lysias of a rhetorical exercise purporting to be a speech in which the captive general Nicias appealed for mercy to the Sicilians. The terrible blow to Athens quickened the energies of an anti-Athenian faction at Thurii. Lysias and his elder brother Polemarchus, with three hundred other persons, were "accused of Atticizing." They were driven from Thurii and settled at Athens (412 B.C.).

Lysias and Polemarchus were rich men, having inherited property from their father; and Lysias claims that, though merely resident aliens, they discharged public services with a liberality which shamed many of those who enjoyed the franchise (_In Eratosth._ 20). The fact that they owned house property shows that they were classed as [Greek: isoteleis], i.e. foreigners who paid only the same tax as citizens, being exempt from the special tax ([Greek: metoikion]) on resident aliens. Polemarchus occupied a house in Athens itself, Lysias another in the Peiraeus, near which was their shield manufactory, employing a hundred and twenty skilled slaves. In 404 the Thirty Tyrants were established at Athens under the protection of a Spartan garrison. One of their earliest measures was an attack upon the resident aliens, who were represented as disaffected to the new government. Lysias and Polemarchus were on a list of ten singled out to be the first victims. Polemarchus was arrested, and compelled to drink hemlock. Lysias had a narrow escape, with the help of a large bribe. He slipped by a back-door out of the house in which he was a prisoner, and took boat to Megara. It appears that he had rendered valuable services to the exiles during the reign of the tyrants, and in 403 Thrasybulus proposed that these services should be recognized by the bestowal of the citizenship. The Boule, however, had not yet been reconstituted, and hence the measure could not be introduced to the ecclesia by the requisite "preliminary resolution" ([Greek: probouleuma]). On this ground it was successfully opposed.

During his later years Lysias--now probably a comparatively poor man owing to the rapacity of the tyrants and his own generosity to the Athenian exiles--appears as a hardworking member of a new profession--that of writing speeches to be delivered in the law-courts. The thirty-four extant are but a small fraction. From 403 to about 380 B.C. his industry must have been incessant. The notices of his personal life in these years are scanty. In 403 he came forward as the accuser of Eratosthenes, one of the Thirty Tyrants. This was his only direct contact with Athenian politics. The story that he wrote a defence for Socrates, which the latter declined to use, probably arose from a confusion. Several years after the death of Socrates the sophist Polycrates composed a declamation against him, to which Lysias replied. A more authentic tradition represents Lysias as having spoken his own _Olympiacus_ at the Olympic festival of 388 B.C., to which Dionysius I. of Syracuse had sent a magnificent embassy. Tents embroidered with gold were pitched within the sacred enclosure; and the wealth of Dionysius was vividly shown by the number of chariots which he had entered. Lysias lifted up his voice to denounce Dionysius as, next to Artaxerxes, the worst enemy of Hellas, and to impress upon the assembled Greeks that one of their foremost duties was to deliver Sicily from a hateful oppression. The latest work of Lysias which we can date (a fragment of a speech _For Pherenicus_) belongs to 381 or 380 B.C. He probably died in or soon after 380 B.C.

Lysias was a man of kindly and genial nature, warm in friendship, loyal to country, with a keen perception of character. and a fine though strictly controlled sense of humour. The literary tact which is so remarkable in the extant speeches is that of a singularly flexible intelligence, always obedient to an instinct of gracefulness. He owes his distinctive place to the power of concealing his art. It was obviously desirable that a speech written for delivery by a client should be suitable to his age, station and circumstances. Lysias was the first to make this adaptation really artistic. His skill can be best appreciated if we turn from the easy flow of his graceful language to the majestic emphasis of Antiphon, or to the self-revealing art of Isaeus. Translated into terms of ancient criticism, he became the model of the "plain style" ([Greek: iochnos charakter, iochne, lite, apheles lexis]: _genus tenue_ or _subtile_). Greek and then Roman critics distinguished three styles of rhetorical composition--the "grand" (or "elaborate"), the "plain" and the "middle," the "plain" being nearest to the language of daily life. Greek rhetoric began in the "grand" style; then Lysias set an exquisite pattern of the "plain"; and Demosthenes might be considered as having effected an almost ideal compromise.

The vocabulary of Lysias is pure and simple. Most of the rhetorical "figures" are sparingly used--except such as consist in the parallelism or opposition of clauses. The taste of the day--not yet emancipated from the influence of the Sicilian rhetoric--probably demanded a large use of antithesis. Lysias excels in vivid description; he has also a happy knack of marking the speaker's character by light touches. The structure of his sentences varies a good deal according to the dignity of the subject. He has equal command over the "periodic" style ([Greek: katestrammene lexis]) and the non-periodic or "continuous" ([Greek: eiromene, dialelumene]). His disposition of his subject-matter is always simple. The speech has usually four parts--introduction ([Greek: prooimion]), narrative of facts ([Greek: diegesis]), proofs ([Greek: pisteis]), which may be either external, as from witnesses, or internal, derived from argument on the facts, and, lastly, conclusion ([Greek: epilogos]). It is in the introduction and the narrative that Lysias is seen at his best. In his greatest extant speech--that _Against Eratosthenes_--and also in the fragmentary _Olympiacus_, he has pathos and fire; but these were not characteristic qualities of his work. In Cicero's judgment (_De Orat._ iii. 7, 28) Demosthenes was peculiarly distinguished by force (_vis_), Aeschines by resonance (_sonitus_), Hypereides by acuteness (_acumen_), Isocrates by sweetness (_suavitas_); the distinction which he assigns to Lysias is _subtilitas_, an Attic refinement--which, as he elsewhere says (_Brutus_, 16, 64) is often joined to an admirable vigour (_lacerti_). Nor was it oratory alone to which Lysias rendered service; his work had an important effect on all subsequent Greek prose, by showing how perfect elegance could be joined to plainness. Here, in his artistic use of familiar idiom, he might fairly be called the Euripides of Attic prose. And his style has an additional charm for modern readers, because it is employed in describing scenes from the everyday life of Athens.[2]

Thirty-four speeches (three fragmentary) have come down under the name
of Lysias; one hundred and twenty-seven more, now lost, are known from
smaller fragments or from titles. In the Augustan age four hundred and
twenty-five works bore his name, of which more than two hundred were
allowed as genuine by the critics. Our thirty-four works may be
classified as follows:--

A. EPIDEICTIC.--1. _Olympiacus_, xxxiii. 388 B.C.; 2. _Epitaphius_,
ii. (purporting to have been spoken during the Corinthian War;
certainly spurious), perhaps composed about 380-340 B.C. ("soon after
387," Blass).

B. DELIBERATIVE.--Plea for the Constitution, xxxiv., 403 B.C.