Theognis

“ Not often, however, despite his sententiousness, which has been the cause of his metamorphose by posterity into a coiner of maxims for the use of schools and the instruction of life and morals, does Theognis muse in such a strain of seriousness. Oftener far his vein is bright and gay, as when he makes ready for a feast, which, if we are not mistaken, was destined to take most of the remainder of his "solid day." ”

“ SS. THEOGNIS, PRIMUS, AND CYRINUS, MM. (about a.d. 320.)
[The Martyrologies of S. Jerome, Bede, Usuardus, &c. Commemorated in the Roman Martyrology on this day; in the Greek Menæa on the 2nd Jan. Theognis, especially, is famous throughout East and West. The account in the Menæa and Menology is probably trustworthy. The Acts published by the Bollandists are of doubtful authority.]
Theognis was the son of the Bishop of Cyzicus, in Hellespont. In the persecution of Licinius, he and his companions suffered at Cyzicus, being first scourged, and then cast into the sea. ”

“ In order to appreciate the value of the fame conferred on Kurnus by Theognis, and celebrated in such lofty strains, we must remember that these elegies were sung at banquets. "The fair young men," of whom the poet speaks, boy-lovers themselves, chaunted the praise of Kurnus to the sound of flutes, while the cups went round or the lyre was passed from hand to hand of merry-making guests. A subject to which Theognis more than once refers is calumny:—
"Often will the folk speak vain things against thee in my ears, and against me in thine. ”

“ Breathing from his heart this curse against the policy of the Corinthians above referred to, and conveniently named after the usurper who founded the system, Theognis soon retired to Thebes, as a state which, from its open sympathy with the politics of the banished Megarians, would be likeliest to offer them an asylum, and to connive at their projects for recovering their native city by force or subtlety. The first glimpse we have of him at Thebes is characteristic of the man in more ways than one. ”

“ Theognis, a Greek poet of Megara, who flourished about 549 years before Christ. He wrote several poems, of which only few sentences are now extant, quoted by Plato and other Greek historians and philosophers, and intended as precepts for the conduct of human life. The morals of the poet have been censured as neither decorous nor chaste. The best edition of Theognis is that of Blackwall, 12mo, London, 1706.――There was also a tragic poet of the same name, whose compositions were so lifeless and inanimated, that they procured him the name of Chion, or snow. ”

“ Whilst Theognis turns the laugh against an ungenerous rival, and this in the spirit of a true gentleman, he finds a sly means of paying a delicate compliment to the taste of the public, upon whose appreciation of music he had to depend for support. ”

“ With the life of Hesiod politics have little or no connection; in that of Theognis we find them playing an essential inseparable part. And it is curious that the very feature which both poets have in common, their subjectivity, is that which introduces us to this point of contrast and token of the ancient world's advancement—namely, that whereas Hesiod's political status is so unimportant as to be overlooked even by himself, with Theognis it occupies more space in his elegies than his social relations or his religious opinions. ”

“ In fact, his personal and political life are so intermixed, that the internal evidence as to both must be collected in one skein, and cannot be separately unwound, unless at the risk of missing somewhat of the interest of his remains, which consists chiefly in the personality of the poet.
It is true that later Greek writers regarded Theognis as a teacher of wisdom and virtue, by means of detached maxims and apothegms in elegiac verse, and would probably have been loath to recognise any element in his poetry which was personal or limited to particular times and situations ”

“ Theognis was a noble, born at Megara about the middle of the sixth century B.C. His city, though traditionally subject to the yoke of Corinth, had under the influence of its aristocracy acquired independence. In course of time Theagenes, a demagogue, gained for himself despotical supremacy, and exiled the members of the old nobility from Megara. ”

“ The general impression produced by a careful reading of Theognis is that he entertained a genuine passion for Kurnus, and that he was anxious to train the young man's mind in what he judged the noblest principles. Love, at the same time, except in its more sensual moments, he describes as bitter-sweet and subject to anxiety. That perturbation of the emotions, which is inseparable from any of the deeper forms of personal attachment, and which the necessary conditions of boy-love exasperated, was irksome to the Greek. ”

“ Generations of students have exhausted their ingenuity in vain efforts to sift the true from the false and to account for the origin and date of the Theognidea as we possess them; the question is fully discussed in the works of Harrison and Hudson-Williams.
The best-attested elegies are those addressed to Cyrnus, the young friend to whom Theognis imparts instruction in the ways of life, bidding him be true to the " good " cause, eschew the company of " evil " men (democrats) , be loyal to his comrades, and wreak cruel vengeance on his foes. ”

“ They were oppressed by the weakness of humanity, so that their verses with regard to man and his lot are gloomy indeed—so much so that in one passage Theognis declares that in reality no mortal man on whom the sun shines is truly happy. Again he holds that man can have no foresight into the future, for it is hardest of all, he says, to learn the end of a thing as yet unaccomplished, to know how god will bring that to pass; a mist is stretched before men’s eyes, and there is no way for mortals to test and try the outcome of the future. ”

“ Theognis is another of the poets of Greece who took a gloomy view of life, and was not happy in his matrimonial ties. He laments that marriages in his native town of Megara are made for money, and avers that such marriages are the bane of the city. Says Theognis:
"Rams and asses, Cyrnus, and horses, we choose of good breed, and wish them to have good pedigrees; but a noble man does not hesitate to wed a baseborn girl if she bring him much money; nor does a noble woman refuse to be the wife of a base but wealthy man, but she chooses the rich instead of the noble. For they honor money ”

“ Before proceeding to examine these elegies in detail, we may touch upon the subject of the friendship of Theognis for Cyrnus, which has been much misunderstood. It must be remembered that Theognis was the only Doric poet of the gnomic class—all those who have been hitherto mentioned belonging without exception to the Ionian family of the Greek race. We are not, therefore, surprised to find some purely Dorian qualities in the poetry of Theognis. Such, for instance, are the invocations to Phœbus and Artemis, with which our collection of fragments opens ”

“ A very pretty vignette might be made of this, or of a kindred fragment that seems to belong to his later days. And to tell the truth, the poet's rule seems to have been that you should "live while you may." Whether, as has been surmised by Mr Frere, he refers to the catastrophe of Hipparchus or not, the four lines which follow indicate Theognis's conviction that everything is fated,—a conviction very conducive to enjoyment of the passing hour. ”

“ The verses of Theognis which refer to the second period of his life begin with a caution to Cyrnus to keep his strains as much a secret as the fame of his poetry will allow, and evince the same sensitiveness to public opinion as so many other of his remains. He cannot gain and keep, he regrets to own, the goodwill of his fellow-citizens, any more than Zeus can please all parties, whilst—
"Some call for rainy weather, some for dry." ”

“ That our poet was of noble birth may be inferred from the confidence with which, in reply to an indignity put upon him in his exile at Thebes, to which we shall refer in due course, he asserts his descent from "noble Æthon," as if the very mention of the name would prove his rank to his contemporaries; and in the first fragment (according to the ingenious chronological arrangement of Frere, which we follow throughout) , Theognis is found in the heyday of prosperity, praying Zeus, and Apollo, the special patron of his fatherland, to preserve his youth ”

“ Death is the lighter evil of the two."— (F.)
Possibly, as we hear no more of him, the poet's younger and less sensitive comrade did not respond to the invitation. Certainly Theognis shortly transferred his residence to Sicily, that isle of the west, which was to his countrymen what America is to ours, the refuge of unemployed enterprise and unappreciated talent. Arrived there, he quickly shakes off the gloom which the impressions of a sea-voyage would not tend to lighten, and prepares to grapple in earnest the problem "how to manage to live." ”

“ Of such a love we have a record in the elegies of Theognis, in which the poet has embodied, for the benefit of Kurnus his friend, the ripe experience of an eventful life. The poems for the most part are didactic in character, consciously and deliberately aimed at the instruction and guidance of the man to whom they are addressed ”

“ Xenophon called the poetry of Theognis “a comprehensive treatment concerning men,” and as such it was used with the works of Homer and Hesiod in the educational system of fourth-century Athens. Moderns will find in the extant fragments little of the power which saves a poet’s politics and ethics from becoming in a later age either outworn or commonplace. But in the public square of the village, the old hillside market-place, we acquire a sympathy for his personal life and his love of home. ”

“ Theognis, an elegiac poet of Megara; flourished in the second half of the 6th century B.C.; lost his possessions during a revolution at Megara, in which the democrats overpowered the aristocrats, to which party he belonged; compelled to live in exile, he found solace in the writing of poetry full of a practical and prudential wisdom, bitterly biased against democracy, and tinged with pessimism.
Theology, the science which treats of God, particularly as He manifests Himself in His relation to man in nature, reason, or revelation.
Theophrastus, a peripatetic philosopher, born in Lesbos ”

“ Tyrants were as hateful to the true oligarchs as a democracy, and Theognis in one place actually advises tyrannicide: "To lay low a despot who consumes the people is no sin, and will not be punished by the gods" (1181) . This sentiment corresponds with the couplet of Simonides on Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and with the apothegms of several of the sages.
Theognis, seeing Cyrnus environed with political difficulties, thought fit to furnish him with rules of conduct. ”

“ They specified in the same letter, that he was manifestly guilty of having broken a mystical chalice, and that this fact was attested by Theognis, bishop of Nicæa; by Maris, bishop of Chalcedonia; by Theodore, bishop of Heraclea; by Valentinus and Ursacius; and by Macedonius, who had been sent to the village in Egypt, where the chalice was said to have been broken, in order to ascertain the truth. ”

“ The Jews had concentrated their thought upon moral phenomena: in their jealousy of the abstract purity of the soul they banned the arts as impious.
Theognis tells us that when the Muses and the Graces came down from Olympus to the marriage-feast of Cadmus and Harmonia, they sang a song with this immortal burden:
ὅττι καλὸν, φίλον ἐστί· τὸ δ' οὐ καλὸν οὐ φίλον ἐστίν. [292]
This strikes the key-note to the music of the Greek genius. ”

“ The school-exercises which Aphthonius prescribed clearly illustrate these objections. The artificiality of obeying all the rules at all times for a certain type of subject is apparent even in the models. In a little essay on ‘Poverty’, introduced by two verses of Theognis, the poet, under the heading ἐγκωμιαστικόν, is praised at length for seeing what an exaggerated emphasis poets lay on myths, and turning to serious moral teaching. ”

“ Here it is obvious how much of ethical meaning the words "good" and "bad" involved, even in the times of the Megarian poet, and how vastly important he considered the society of well-bred companions to be in the formation of character. A different view of moral habits seems to be taken in another fragment (429-438) , where Theognis attributes more influence to nature than to training: "To beget and rear a child," he says, "is easier than to instil good principles. No one ever devised means for making fools wise, or bad men good. ”

“ Mr Frere notes the characteristic touch in the fourth line, "The victim of a popular revolution lamenting that democracy has destroyed the Graces." But as time passed, and the exiles still failed to compass their return, distrust and impatience begin to be rife amongst them. Theognis applies the crucible, which frequently figures in his poetry, and might almost indicate a quondam connection with the Megarian Mint, and fails to discover a sterling unadulterated mind in the whole range of his friends. In bitterness of spirit he finds out at last that
"An exile has no friends! ”

“ But it seemed better to him to mention it to Theognis, for he thought that he would do anything, if one should give him money. 15. And, while he was conversing with Theognis (as I happened to be acquainted with the house, and knew that there were two doors) , it seemed best to me to try to save myself, thinking that, if I should escape detection, I should be safe, but, if I should be taken, I thought that, if Theognis should be persuaded by Damnippus to receive a bribe, I should get off nevertheless, but otherwise I should die all the same. 16. ”