Alcman (b. 660 B.C.) was a Lydian of Sardis, and an emancipated slave. His poems exhibit a great variety of metre, of dialect, and of poetic tone. He is regarded as having overcome the difficulties presented by the rough dialect of Sparta, and as having succeeded in investing it with a certain grace. He is one of the poets whose image is most effaced by time, and of whom we can obtain little accurate knowledge. The admiration awarded him by antiquity is scarcely justified by the extant remains of his poems. Stesichorus (fl. 611 B.C.) lived at a time when the predominant tendency of the Greek mind was towards lyric poetry. His special business was the training and direction of the choruses, and he assumed the name of Stesichorus, or leader of choruses, his real name being Tesias. His metres approach more nearly to the epos than those of Aleman. As Quintilian says, he sustained the weight of epic poetry with the lyre. His language accorded with the tone of his poetry, and he is not less remarkable in himself, than as the precursor of the perfect lyric poetry of Pindar. Arion (625-585 B.C.) was chiefly known in Greece as the perfecter of the "Dithyramb," a song of Bacchanalian festivals, doubtless of great antiquity. Its character, like the worship to which it belonged, was always impassioned and enthusiastic; the extremes of feeling, rapturous pleasure, and wild lamentation were both expressed in it. Ibycus (b. 528 B.C.) was a wandering poet, as is attested by the story of his death having been avenged by the cranes. His poetical style resembles that of Stesichorus, as also his subjects. The erotic poetry of Ibycus is most celebrated, and breathes a fervor of passion far exceeding that of any similar production of Greek literature. Simonides (556-468 B.C.) has already been described as one of the great masters of the elegy and epigram. In depth and novelty of ideas, and in the fervor of poetic feeling, he was far inferior to his contemporary Pindar, but he was probably the most prolific lyric poet of Greece. According to the frequent reproach of the ancients, he was the first that sold his poems for money. His style was not as lofty as that of Pindar, hut what he lost in sublimity he gained in pathos. Bacchylides (fl. 450 B.C.), the nephew of Simonides, devoted his genius chiefly to the pleasures of private life, love, and wine, and his productions, when compared with those of Simonides, are marked by less moral elevation. Timocreon the Rhodian (fl. 471 B.C.) owes his chief celebrity among the ancients to the hate he bore to Themistocles in political life, and to Simonides on the field of poetry.