CHYTROLICTES TO PATELLOCHARON

Perhaps you would like to know why I am complaining so, and how I got my head broken, and why I’m going around with my clothes in tatters.  The fact is I swept the board at gambling:  but I wish I hadn’t; for what’s the sense in a feeble fellow like me running up against a lot of stout young men?  You see, after I scooped in all the money they put up, and they hadn’t a cent left, they all jumped on my neck, and some of them punched me, and some of them stoned me, and some of them tore my clothes off my back.  All the same, I hung on to the money as hard as I could, because I would rather die than give up anything of theirs I had got hold of; and so I held out bravely for quite a while, not giving in when they struck me, or even when they bent my fingers back.  In fact, I was like some Spartan who lets himself be whipped as a test of his endurance:  but unfortunately it wasn’t at Sparta that I was doing this thing, but at Athens, and with the toughest sort of an Athenian gambling crowd; and so at last, when actually fainting, I had to let the ruffians rob me.  They went through my pockets, and after they had taken everything they could find, they skipped.  After all, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s better to live without money than to die with a pocket full of it.

From the ‘Epistolae,’ iii. 54.

ALCMAN

(Seventh Century B.C.)

According to legend, this illustrious Grecian lyric poet was born in Lydia, and taken to Sparta as a slave when very young, but emancipated by his master on the discovery of his poetic genius.  He flourished probably between 670 and 630, during the peace following the Second Messenian War.  It was that remarkable period in which the Spartans were gathering poets and musicians from the outer world of liberal accomplishment to educate their children; for the Dorians thought it beneath the dignity of a Dorian citizen to practice these things themselves.

His poetic remains indicate a social freedom at this period hardly in keeping with the Spartan rigor alleged to have been practiced without break from the ancient time of Lycurgus; perhaps this communal asceticism was really a later growth, when the camp of militant slave-holders saw their fibre weakening under the art and luxury they had introduced.  He boasts of his epicurean appetite; with evident truthfulness, as a considerable number of his extant fragments are descriptions of dishes.  He would have echoed Sydney Smith’s—­

     “Fate cannot harm me—­I have dined to-day.”

In a poem descriptive of spring, he laments that the season affords but a scanty stock of his favorite viands.