After this lengthy, but far from exhaustive, enumeration of the kinds and occasions of lyrical poetry in Greece, we may turn to consider the different parts played in their cultivation by the several chief families of Hellas. It is remarkable that all the great writers of elegies and iambics were Ionians; Theognis of Megara is the only Dorian whose genuine poems are celebrated; and against his we have to set the bulk of Solon, Mimnermus, Phocylides, Callinus, and Tyrtæus, all Ionians.[90] Not a single Dorian poet seems to have composed iambics, the rigid discipline and strong sense of decorum in a Dorian state probably rendering the cultivation of satire impossible. We are told that the Spartans would not even suffer Archilochus to lodge as a stranger among them. But when we turn to lyric poetry--to the poetry of stanzas and strophes--the two other families of the Greeks, the Æolians and the Dorians, take the lead. As a Dorian was exceptional among the elegists, so now an Ionian will be comparatively rare among the lyrists. So great was the æsthetical conservatism of the Greeks that throughout their history their primitive distinctions of dialect are never lost sight of. When the Athenians developed tragedy, they wrote their iambics in pure Attic, but they preserved a Dorian tone in their choruses. The epic hexameter and the elegy, on the other hand, retained an Ionian character to the last. The paths struck out by the Æolians and Dorians in the domain of lyric poetry were so different as to justify us in speaking of two distinct species. When Milton in the _Paradise Regained_ catalogued the poetical achievements of the Greeks, he assigned their true place to these two species in the line-- Æolian charms and Dorian lyric odes. The poets and poetesses of the Ægean Islands cultivated a rapid and effusive style, polishing their passionate stanzas so exquisitely that they well deserve the name of charms. The Dorian poets, inspired by a graver and more sustained imagination, composed long and complex odes for the celebration of gods and heroes. The Æolian singer dwelt on his own joys and sorrows; the Dorian bard addressed some deity, or told the tales of demigods and warriors. The Æolian chanted his stanzas to the lyre or flute; the Dorian trained a chorus, who gave utterance to his verse in dance and song.