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Updated: May 21, 2025
In Athens, which does present the model, matters were far otherwise. In the year 700 B. C., the Spartans called upon Athens for a commander to lead them to the second Messenian war, and the Athenians sent them Tyrtaeus, their martial poet.
After these, excellent Homer and Tyrtaeus animated the manly mind to martial achievements with their verses. It has been made a question, whether good poetry be derived from nature or from art.
He must have known very well that the name of such a Tyrtaeus cannot reappear as the editor of Le Sens Commun; that in launching his little firebrand he burned all vessels that could waft him back to the port he had quitted. But I dare say he has done well for his own interests; I doubt if Le Sens Commun can much longer hold its ground in the midst of the prevalent lunacy."
He has not inaptly been styled the Tyrtaeus of modern English poetry, and one of the most chaste and tender as well as original of poets. He owes less than any other British poet to his predecessors and contemporaries. He has lived to see his lines quoted like those of earlier poets in the literature of his day, lisped by children, and sung at public festivals.
Poetry, indeed, was still to be preserved; because Poetry was a useful thing: men needed amusement, and loved to amuse themselves with Poetry: the playhouse was a pretty lounge of an evening; then there were so many precepts, satirical, didactic, so much more impressive for the rhyme; to say nothing of your occasional verses, birthday odes, epithalamiums, epicediums, by which 'the dream of existence may be so highly sweetened and embellished. Nay, does not Poetry, acting on the imaginations of men, excite them to daring purposes; sometimes, as in the case of Tyrtaeus, to fight better; in which wise may it not rank as a useful stimulant to man, along with Opium and Scotch Whisky, the manufacture of which is allowed by law?
Jokai, who is still living and enjoys a world-wide fame as a novelist, and Petofi, the eminent poet, who was destined to become the Tyrtaeus of his nation, were then both young men, full of enthusiasm and intrepid energy, and teeming with great ideas.
The god bade them apply to Athens for a leader. Fearing to disobey the oracle, but with the view of rendering no real assistance, the Athenians sent Tyrtaeus, a lame man and a schoolmaster. The Spartans received their new leader with due honour; and he was not long in justifying the credit of the oracle.
Those who think that the Spartans felt their discipline to be essentially a hardship should read the song of Tyrtaeus, which they recited in their tents on the eve of battle: With spirit let us fight for this land, and for our children die, being no longer chary of our lives. Fight, then, young men, standing fast one by another, nor be beginners of cowardly flight or fear.
In the second war, the Messenians revolted against the tyrannical rule of Sparta, and at first, under Aristomenes, were successful, but were afterwards defeated by the Spartans, who were inspirited for the conflict by the war-songs of the Athenian poet, Tyrtaeus. Aristomenes fled to Rhodes. Most of his people were made helots.
I have nothing to sing about those glorious fellows, except 'God save the Queen and them. I tell you the whole thing stuns me, so I cannot sit down to make fiddle rhyme with diddle about it or blundered with hundred like Alfred Tennyson. He is no Tyrtaeus, though he has a glimpse of what Tyrtaeus ought to be. But I have not even that; and am going rabbit shooting to-morrow instead.
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