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Updated: May 12, 2025
Elegiac poetry had been cultivated by several Greek writers, particularly Callimachus, Mimnermus, and Philetas; but, so far as we can find, had, until the present age, been unknown to the Romans in their own tongue.
Take, for instance, this fragment of Mimnermus, on the shortness of life, what subject can seem more tame? what less striking than the feelings he expresses? and yet, throughout every line, there is a melancholy depth and tenderness, which it is impossible to define.
Besides, Solon, in his answer to Mimnermus about the time of life, has written the verses: "To me may favouring Heaven send, That all my friends may mourn my end,"
Or, if he seems to make a greater demand, he becomes Mimnermus, and grows in fame by the chosen appellation. Those who make bad verses are laughed at: but they are pleased in writing, and reverence themselves; and if you are silent, they, happy, fall to praising of their own accord whatever they have written.
Let us bathe with an indigested and full-swollen stomach, forgetting what is becoming, what not; deserving to be enrolled among the citizens of Caere; like the depraved crew of Ulysses of Ithaca, to whom forbidden pleasure was dearer than their country. If, as Mimnermus thinks, nothing is pleasant without love and mirth, live in love and mirth. Live: be happy.
Besides, Tellus, though keeping his post and fighting like a valiant soldier, was yet slain by his enemies; but Poplicola, the better fortune, slew his, and saw his country victorious under his command. And his honors and triumphs brought him, which was Solon's ambition, to a happy end; the ejaculation which, in his verses against Mimnermus about the continuance of man's life, he himself made,
At what period the home of AEetes was placed in Colchis, it is not easy to determine. Mimnermus, a contemporary of Solon, makes the home of AEetes lie 'on the brink of ocean, a very vague description. Pindar, on the other hand, in the splendid Fourth Pythian Ode, already knows Colchis as the scene of the loves and flight of Jason and Medea.
What a sigh from the heart of the old sensuous world breathes in the strain of Mimnermus, bewailing with so fierce and so deep a sorrow the advent of the years in which man is loved no more! Lysander's eye was still along the solitary road, when he heard a low musical laugh behind him. He started in surprise, and beheld Percalus.
In the same way, a peculiar vein of Anglo-Saxon thought, in relation to Destiny and Death, is purely Homeric, though necessarily unborrowed; nor were a native Fijian poet's lines on old age, sine amore jocisque, borrowed from Mimnermus! There is such a thing as congruity of genius. Mr.
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