Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE DESCENDANTS OF HOMER, HESIOD, ORPHEUS The end of the traditional epos came with the rise of the idea of literary property. A rhapsode like Kynaethus would manipulate the Homer he recited, without ever wanting to publish the poems as his own. Onomacritus would hand over his laborious theology to Orpheus without intending either dishonesty or self-sacrifice. This community of literary goods lasted longer in the epos than in the song; but Homer, Hesiod, and Orpheus had by the sixth and fifth centuries to make room for living poets who stood on their own feet. The first epic poet in actual history is generally given as Pisander of CamJrus, in Rhodes, author of an Heracleia Tradition gives him the hoariest antiquity, but he appears really to be only the Rhodian ' Homer.' The fragments themselves bear the brand of the sixth century, the talk of sin and the cry for purification. Pisander is not mentioned in classical times; he was, perhaps, ' discovered' by the romantic movement of the third century, as the earliest literary authority for the Heracles of the Twelve Labours, the Lion-skin and the Club.1 Heracles was also the hero of the prophet andpoet PANvAsis of Halicarnassus: the name is Carian, but the man was the uncle of Herodotus, and met his death in a rebellion against Lygdamis, the Carian governor of his native state. He wrote elegies as well as his epic. One Alexandrian critic puts Panyasis next to Homer among epic poets: generally, he came fourth, after Hesiod and Antimachus. In Quintilian he appears as a mixture of the last two writers—his matter more interesting than Hesiod's, his arrangement better than that of Antimachus. The fragments are un-Homeric, but strong and well written. Accident has preserved us three pieces somewhat in the tone of the contemporar...

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