[74] The degradation of women was undoubtedly the source of many of the worst faults of the Greek race. Yet it is easy to overestimate the importance of such satires as that of Simonides; nor would it be fair to take them as expressing the deliberate opinion of the nation. The Jews, who gave a nobler place in social life to women, ascribed the fall of man to Eve. Modern literature again, in spite of Christianity and chivalry, is not wanting in epigrams like the following, ascribed to Leo Battista Alberti: "Levity and inconstancy were given to women as a counterbalance to their perfidy and badness; for, could woman stick to her purpose, she would destroy all the fair works of man." [75] Plutarch's _Life of Cleomenes_ contains two historical pictures of heroic wifehood. CHAPTER X. _THE LYRIC POETS._ The Æsthetic Instinct of the Greeks in their Choice of Metres.--Different Species of Lyrical Poetry.--The Fragments in Bergk's Collection.--Proemia.--Prosodia.--Parthenia.--Pæan.-- Hyporchem.--Dithyramb.--Phallic Hymn.--Epinikia.--Threnoi.--Scolia.--Æolian and Dorian Lyrists.--The Flourishing Period of Lesbos.--Sappho.--Alcæus.--Anacreon.--Nationality of the Dorian Lyrists.--Spartan Education.--Alcman.--Arion.--Stesichorus.--Ibycus.--Simonides.-- Greek Troubadours.--Style of Simonides.--Pindar.--Later Literary Odes. To compress into a single essay all that should be said about the Greek lyrical poets is impossible. Yet by eliminating the writers of elegies and iambics, who have been considered separately as gnomic poets and satirists, the field is somewhat narrowed. Simonides of Amorgos, Archilochus, Theognis, Solon, not to mention lesser names, are by this process legitimately excluded. The Æolian lyrists, with Sappho at their head, and the so-called Dorian lyrists, who culminate in Pindar, remain. Casting a glance backward into the remote shadows of antiquity, we find that lyrical poetry, like all art in Greece, took its origin in connection with primitive Nature-worship. The song of Linus,[76] referred to by Homer in his description of the shield of Achilles, was a lament sung by reapers for the beautiful dead youth who symbolized the decay of summer's prime.[77] In the funeral chant for Adonis, women bewailed the fleeting splendor of the spring; and Hyacinthus, loved and slain by Phoebus, whom the Laconian youths and maidens honored, was again a type of vernal loveliness defloured. The Bacchic songs of alternating mirth and sadness, which gave birth, through the dithyramb, to tragedy, and through the Comus-hymn to comedy, marked the waxing and the waning of successive years, the pulses of the heart of Nature, to which men listened as the months passed over them. In their dim beginnings these elements of Greek poetry are hardly to be distinguished from the dirges and the raptures of