Thaletas, coming from an island where the dance had been important from prehistoric times, and finding in Sparta the same friendly atmosphere of open Dorian life, introduced the festival of the Gymnopædia, in which boys displayed the perfected beauty of their naked bodies in athletic dances and, by means of formal songs in unison, began the “choral lyric.” This poetic form, passing far beyond its birthplace, became everywhere in Greece the chief expression of public worship of gods and heroes and stimulated the powers of such poets as Simonides and Pindar and Bacchylides. Thaletas was lost sight of in his greater successor Alcman, who not only was credited with the creation as well as with the cultivation of the choral lyric, but also was adjudged so successful in all his work that Alexandrian scholars included him in their canon of the melic poets, with Pindar and Sappho. Terpander and Thaletas are little more than names, familiar only to those who study origins. Alcman and Tyrtæus, the poet of the Messenian War, are representatives of the vital poetry which Sparta cherished in her supple youth before her ideals had matured and her life had irreparably settled into its narrow grooves. Tyrtæus was probably an Athenian, even if it is mere legend that he was a lame schoolmaster sent by Athens in derision when Sparta appealed for help in the second Messenian War. Alcman was born in Sardis, though probably of Hellenic blood. If our traditional dates are correct, some years at least of their lives must have coincided. Their poetry in general represented different modes, Tyrtæus being the earliest master, outside of Ionia, of the flute-accompanied elegiac distich, the lusty heir of the Homeric hexameter, while Alcman established many of the more delicate measures permitted by the versatile lyre. Their poetic purposes, however, were influenced in common by the Dorian atmosphere in which they lived. In Tyrtæus this showed itself in the creation of martial verse, which seems to have been powerfully influential in arousing into active service, at a time of need, the courage and the perseverance ingrained in the Doric character. But his own racial gift made it impossible that his poetry should be confined to one country. In all parts of Greece, through many centuries, it expressed the ideal of courage. One of his anapæstic songs, intended to be sung by Spartan soldiers as they marched to battle, has been called the Marseillaise of Greece. A fragment of it still stirs the blood:— “Up! youths of the Spartan nobles, Ye citizen sons of the elders! With the left hold out your targes, And fling your spears with boldness. Spare not your lives. To spare them Was never known in Sparta.”