Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates, стр. 327

THE HELLENISTIC PERIOD

going to bed’, and you dally, there is nothing of the lover at all about you.”

The following epigram might well be entitled “Missed fire”. “ Wait, charming girl. What is your beautiful name? Where can I see you? I will give you whatever you want. You don’t even say a word. Where do you live? I will send someone to fetch you. Are you engaged to anyone ? Farewell, proud woman. You won’t even say farewell? I shall approach you again and again, for I know how to soften even harder women than you. Now, farewell, madam.”

As the poet gets older, his language becomes milder; gently complaining, he thinks of youth and its sweet games of love, whose place is now taken by wisdom and prudence; but in a spirit of resignation he consoles himself with the trutheverything in its time.

(c) Farce, Cinedic Poetry, Mimus, Bucolic Poetry, Mimiambus

Of the purely lyric productions of this period next to nothing has been preserved. Alexander /tolus, so called from having been born in /Etolia, about the turning point of the third century B.c., in his elegy entitled Apollo had introduced the god of prophecy as foretelling stories of unhappy love. Parthenius has preserved a specimen of it—the story of the adulterous passion of the wife of Phobius for the beautiful Antheus, whom she in vain endeavours to seduce, and then out of revenge throws into the depth of a well.

In lower Italy, especially in voluptuous Tarentum (according to Plato, Laws, 637b, the whole city was drunk during the Dionysia), a special kind of farce had developed, the hilaro-tragedia or the so-called phlyax, and coarse popular farces of this class had also spread throughout Greece. They had been introduced into literature by Rhinthon of Tarentum, to whom thirty-eight were ascribed,

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