Definition of the Term Gnomic.--The Elegiac Metre.--The Age of the Despots in Greece.--Three Periods in Elegiac Poetry: the Martial, the Erotic, the Gnomic.--Callinus.--Tyrtæus.--Mimnermus.--His Epicurean Philosophy of Life.--Solon.--The Salaminian Verses.--Doctrine of Hereditary Guilt.--Greek Melancholy.--Phocylides.--His Bourgeois Intellect.--Xenophanes.--Theognis.--The Politics of Megara.--Cyrnus.--Precepts upon Education and Conduct in Public and Private Life.--The Biography of Theognis.--Dorian Clubs.--Lamentations over the Decay of Youth and Beauty. The term Gnomic, when applied to a certain number of Greek poets, is arbitrary. There is no definite principle for rejecting some and including others in the class. It has, however, been usual to apply this name to Solon, Phocylides, Theognis, and Simonides of Ceos. Yet there seems no reason to exclude some portions of Callinus, Tyrtæus, Mimnermus, and Xenophanes. These poets, it will be observed, are all writers of the elegy. Some of the lyric poets, however, and iambographers, such as Simonides of Amorgos and Archilochus, have strong claims for admission into the list. For, as the derivation of the name implies, gnomic poets are simply those who embody #gnômai#, or sententious maxims on life and morals, in their verse; and though we find that the most celebrated masters of this style composed elegies, we yet may trace the thread of gnomic thought in almost all the writers of their time. Conversely, the most genuine authors of elegiac gnomes trespassed upon the domain of lyric poetry, and sang of love and wine and personal experience no less than of morality. In fact, the gnomic poets represent a period of Greek literature during which the old and simple forms of narrative poetry were giving way to lyrical composition on the one hand, and to meditative writing on the other; when the epical impulse had become extinct, and when the Greeks were beginning to think definitely. The elegy, which seems to have originated in Asia Minor, and to have been used almost exclusively by poets of the Ionian race for the expression of emotional and reflective sentiments, lent itself to this movement in the development of the Greek genius, and formed a sort of midway stage between the impassioned epic of the Homeric age and the no less impassioned poetry and prose of the Athenian age of gold. Viewed in this light, the gnomic poets mark a transition from Homer and Hesiod to the dramatists and moralists of Attica. The ethical precepts inherent in the epos received from them a more direct and proverbial treatment; while they in turn prepared for the sophists, the orators, and Socrates.