As a contrast to the epinikia we may take the different kinds of threnoi, or funeral songs. The most primitive was called epikedeion, a dirge or coronach, improvised by women over the bodies of the dead.[86] The lamentations of Helen and Andromache for Hector, and of the slave-girls for Patroclus, are Homeric instances of this species. Euripides imitates them in his tragedies--in the dirge sung by Antigone, for instance, in the _Phoenissæ_, and in the wailings of Hecuba for Astyanax in the _Troades_. A different kind of threnos were the songs of Linus, Hyacinth, Adonis, and others, to which I have already alluded in the beginning of this chapter. The finest extant specimen of this sort is Bion's _Lament for Adonis_, which, however, was composed in the idyllic age, when the hexameter had been substituted for the richer and more splendid lyric metres. A third class of threnos consisted of complex choral hymns composed by poets like Simonides or Pindar, to be sung at funeral solemnities. Many of our most precious lyric fragments, those which embody philosophical reflections on life and dim previsions of another world, belong to dirges of this elaborate kind. Marriage festivals offered another occasion for lyric poetry. The hymeneal, sung during the wedding ceremony, the epithalamium, chanted at the house of the bridegroom, and many other species, have been defined by the grammarians. Unfortunately we possess nothing but the merest _débris_ of any true Greek ode of this kind. Sappho's are the best. We have to study the imitations of her style in Catullus, the marriage chorus at the end of the _Birds_ of Aristophanes, and the epithalamium of Helen by Theocritus, in order to form a remote conception of what a Sapphic marriage chorus might have been. In banquet songs we are more fortunate. Abundant are the paroenia of Alcæus, Anacreon, Theognis, and others. Scolia, or catches, so called from their irregular metrical structure, were also in vogue at banquets; and of these popular songs a sufficient number are preserved. A drunken passage in the works of Aristophanes brings before us after a lively fashion the ceremonies with which the scolion and the wine-cup circled the symposium together.[87] Of all these catches the most celebrated in ancient days was the panegyric of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, attributed to Callistratus. As I have the opportunity of printing from MS. a translation of this song by the late Professor Conington, I will introduce it here: In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive, Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave, Who, striking the tyrant down, Made Athens a freeman's town. Harmodius, our darling, thou art not dead! Thou liv'st in the isles of the blest, 'tis said, With Achilles first in speed, And Tydides Diomede. In a wreath of myrtle I'll wear my glaive, Like Harmodius and Aristogeiton brave, When the twain on Athena's day Did the tyrant Hipparchus slay.