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There was a peculiarly beautiful figure of Stesichorus, the poet, as an old man bent double, with a book in his hand a very glorious work of art; and there was a goat in bronze probably as to which Cicero is at the pains of telling us that even he, unskilled as he was in such matters, could see its charms.

The character of the people, too, was attuned to poetry. The Dorian settlers had kept alive the magic of rivers, of pools where the Nereids dance, and uplands haunted by Pan. This popular poetry influenced the literary verse of Sicily. The songs of Stesichorus, a minstrel of the early period, and the little rural 'mimes' or interludes of Sophron are lost, and we have only fragments of Epicharmus.

As Stesichorus fabled that only an eidolon of Helen went to Troy, so, except in the "Iliad" and "Odyssey," we meet but shadows of her loveliness, phantasms woven out of clouds, and the light of setting suns. To dream over literary projects, Balzac says, is like "smoking enchanted cigarettes," but when we try to tackle our projects, to make them real, the enchantment disappears.

The incident is very old, as in the story of Zeus and Amphitryon, and might be used whenever a lady's character needed to be saved. But this anecdote, on the whole, is inconsistent with the repentance of Helen, and is not in Homer's manner. The early lyric poet, Stesichorus, is said to have written harshly against Helen.

Stesichorus in a famous poem tells how Helen blinded him for maligning her; she never went to Troy; it was a wraith which accompanied Paris. Such is the central idea of a very strange play, the Helen. The scene is in Egypt.

Prince Ptolemy, farewell, and of thee will I make mention, even as of the other demigods; and a word methinks I will utter not to be rejected of men yet unborn, excellence, howbeit, thou shalt gain from Zeus. This epithalamium may have been written for the wedding of a friend of the poet's. The idea is said to have been borrowed from an old poem by Stesichorus.

On his return he described what he had seen how that Achilles was now married to Helen; and it was Leonymus who told Stesichorus that his blindness was due to Helen's wrath, and thus induced him to write the Palinode. Achilles himself is once said to have appeared to a trader who frequently visited the island.

And therefore being made subject to every kind of contumely, so that by her depreciation she might not choose to depart, she had sunk to as low as the human form, as though she had had to be restrained by chains of flesh, and then for many ages being turned about through a succession of female conditions, she became also that Helen who proved so fatal to Priam, and after to the eyes of Stesichorus, for she had caused his blindness on account of the insult of his poem, and afterwards had removed it because of her pleasure at his praise.

Aeolic Lyric Poets; Alcasus; Sappho; Anacreon. 9. Doric, or Choral Lyric Poets; Alcman; Stesichorus; Pindar. 10. The Orphic Doctrines and Poems. 11. Pre-Socratic Philosophy; Ionian, Eleatic, Pythagorean Schools. 12. History; Herodotus. Literary Predominance of Athens. 2. Greek Drama. 3. Tragedy. 4. The Tragic Poets; Aeschylus; Sophocles; Euripides. 5. Comedy; Aristophanes; Menander. 6.

She also was in that Helen, on whose account the Trojan War arose; wherefore also Stesichorus was deprived of his sight when he spake evil of her in his poems; and that afterwards when he repented and wrote what is called a recantation, in which he sang her praises, he recovered his sight.