Note 147 — Chapter XXIX · LYRIC POETRY. — THE SEVEN WISE MEN.

Mr. Clinton (Fasti Hellen. ad ann. 671, 665, 644) appears to me noway satisfactory in his chronological arrangements of the poets of this century. I agree with O. Müller (Hist. of Literat. of Ancient Greece, ch. xii, 9) in thinking that he makes Terpander too recent, and Thalêtas too ancient; I also believe both Kallinus and Alkman to have been more recent than the place which Mr. Clinton assigns to them; the epoch of Tyrtæus will depend upon the date which we assign to the second Messenian war.

How very imperfectly the chronology of the poetical names even of the sixth century B. C.—Sappho, Anakreon, Hippônax—was known even to writers of the beginning of the Ptolemaic age (or shortly after 300 B. C.), we may see by the mistakes noted in Athenæus, xiii, p. 599. Hermesianax of Kolophon, the elegiac poet, represented Anakreon as the lover of Sappho; this might perhaps be not absolutely impossible, if we supposed in Sappho an old age like that of Ninon de l’Enclos; but others (even earlier than Hermesianax, since they are quoted by Chamæleon) represented Anakreon, when in old age, as addressing verses to Sappho, still young. Again, the comic writer Diphilus introduced both Archilochus and Hippônax as the lovers of Sappho.