ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the Ionia, and also retrogress somewhat in time, in order to trace a new movement, full of important consequences for literature. The iambic poets begin with one of the most interesting figures in Greek literary history, and one the loss of whose works we have most cause to regret. Greek, as Aristotle observes and as extant Greek prose amply proves, had a tendency to fall into quite another kind of metre, the iambic. The Greeks, with their usual artistic sense, preferred to have the inscription as well phrased as possible. The ancients themselves associated the elegiac metre with flute, or rather oboe-music, which was Oriental and not Greek. The earliest of the poets of Greece proper was TYRTAIOS of Sparta; No attention need be paid to the absurd Athenian story that he was an Athenian, still less to the absurder one that he was a lame Athenian schoolmaster.
