Of Solon and Theognis I have spoken in former chapters. They reproduce in part the moralizing vein of Simonidês, though with a strong admixture of personal feeling and a direct application to passing events. The mixture of political with social morality, which we find in both, marks their more advanced age: Solon bears in this respect the same relation to Simonidês, as his contemporary Alkæus bears to Archilochus. His poems, as far as we can judge by the fragments remaining, appear to have been short occasional effusions,—with the exception of the epic poem respecting the submerged island of Atlantis; which he began towards the close of his life, but never finished. They are elegiac, trimeter iambic, and trochaic tetrameter: in his hands certainly neither of these metres can be said to have any special or separate character. If the poems of Solon are short, those of Theognis are much shorter, and are indeed so much broken (as they stand in our present collection), as to read like separate epigrams or bursts of feeling, which the poet had not taken the trouble to incorporate in any definite scheme or series. They form a singular mixture of maxim and passion,—of general precept with personal affection towards the youth Kyrnus,—which surprises us if tried by the standard of literary composition, but which seems a very genuine manifestation of an impoverished exile’s complaints and restlessness. What remains to us of Phokylidês, another of the gnomic poets nearly contemporary with Solon, is nothing more than a few maxims in verse,—couplets, with the name of the author in several cases embodied in them.