The Dorian element that appealed to Alcman was the publicity of the daily life. Men lived in common, ate at large public tables, trained their children in groups, and believed always in the sacrifice of the individual to the necessities of the state. Hence they took kindly to public festivals where choruses of men and women, boys and girls could sing hymns that gave expression to common and national sentiments. These hymns Alcman wrote in great numbers. Especially famous and never displaced by later poets were his partheneia, written for the choruses of Spartan maidens whose share in the athletic training of their brothers made them the most beautiful in Greece. Travellers in Sparta who look at the lifeless ruins of the Temple of Artemis will rejoice that among the broken fragments of Alcman’s poetry exist seven complete strophes of a partheneion which probably was sung before the temple at one of the festivals of the goddess. Helen as a child had danced at such a festival, and doubtless many a girl in Alcman’s chorus was pointed out by the surrounding crowd as her fit successor. In his vigour the poet must often himself have led the dances of these tall, straight maidens. In his old age, too stiff to keep pace with their lithe movements, he added to a song he wrote for them “des images aimables” of gallant regret:— “Nay, now no longer, ye sweet-voicèd maidens, lovely in singing, Can my limbs bear me. Would God, would to God, that a halcyon were I Who with his married mates over the flowering meadows of Ocean Fluttereth, heart-free of trouble, the sea-purple bird of the spring-time.” Verses like these betray an un-Dorian element in Alcman’s genius which came from his Æolian ancestry. It crept into his choral lyrics and claimed its own in his lighter verses. Love and feasting and Bacchic joy furnished him with subjects. No other set of lyric fragments contains so many traces of the consciousness of natural beauties. If all his poetry were preserved, it would not surprise us to find in it a complete and sensitive response to the extraordinary loveliness amid which he lived. We know already that by night in the valley of the Eurotas he watched sleep descend upon the crests and crags of Taygetus and the waiting earth,[44] was aware of the dew of moonlit evenings and the songs of birds, and felt the charms of the alternating seasons, especially the invigorating bloom of spring. Footnote 44: For this fragment see chapter i, p. 22.