OF CELEBRATED AUTHORS

...manners, turning them away from drunkenness and shameful things, advising them to advance toward honors by the right path, and instilling a care for honesty everywhere. This refers to his Gnomologia collection of moral maxims; for his Paraeneses exhortations, being sprinkled here and there with outrages, are shunned by all good men, as Suidas warns, and are happily hidden by darkness. His style is simple and natural, yet suitable enough both for youth and for the subjects he set out to teach. See Borrichius, On the Poets, page 20.

Plutarch, in the book On Reading the Poets, judges that Empedocles and Parmenides in natural philosophy, Nicander in venomous animals, and Theognis in moral sentences, produced a song, not a poem; they borrowed the meter from the Poet as a vehicle, by which they might escape the lowliness of a prose style.

If Le Fèvre is to be believed, Theognis was not counted among the more distinguished poets of Greece. He says that his works contain nothing pathetic or ingenious. Everything in them is quite simple and void of ornaments. Yet he does not deny that his ethics can be read with profit, and that in Greece, boys were ordered to learn this author by heart. Short Lives of the Greek Poets, page 42.

We learn from Suidas that there was also another Theognis, but a tragic one, who was called Nix Snow because of his cold dramas.

Theognis used the Doric dialect.

Theognis, the prince of gnomic poets, is most fit for forming character together with Phocylides, and in the judgment of Isocrates, is quite necessary. Bonifacio, Ludicrous History, book 15, chapter 8.

Suidas says that Theognis is certainly not pure in his precepts. He teaches that revenge should be taken on enemies, which is far removed from Christian piety. But what wonder is it, since the man was a pagan? Yet some among the pagans, such as Socrates, would have advised no such thing, nor even commanded it. Claude Verderius, Critique of Authors.

Among the editions of Theognis, those of Henri and Friedrich Sylburg are praised.

A E S C H Y L U S

He flourished before Christ in the year 482. He flourished in the 2nd year of the 71st Olympiad, as Eusebius says in his Chronicles. In that year he himself fought bravely at Marathon, according to Suidas. He was the first (says Suidas) to discover how tragic actors should put on terrifying masks smeared with dregs, and likewise that they should use cothurni buskins, or larger boots. Although he produced 90 tragedies, he won twenty-eight times, or as others say, only thirteen times. Of his tragedies only seven survive, and not all of those are complete: Prometheus Bound, Seven Against Thebes, The Persians, Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides, and The Suppliants.

Aeschylus is sublime, grave, and high-sounding even to a fault; but he is unrefined in most things and disordered. Quintilian, book 10 of the Institutes of Oratory, chapter 1. His frequent metaphors are praised, and would be more praised if he persisted in them and did not break them off before they were expected to end. His epithets, being of a military mind, are generally quite bold, and his concepts are immoderate. Borrichius, On the Poets, page 29.

He first introduced two actors to the stage, according to Aristotle. He introduced clothing suitable for princes and covered the stage with boards, according to Horace. He removed killings from the...