Simichidas

Abstract

It is more than a hundred years since the walls of Athens were pulled down to the sound of the flute, since Euripides died, since the fresh, vigorous, political life of Athens passed into the era of orators and philosophers. And even the era of orators and philosophers has lost its power and originality, and no Greek city has taken the place of Athens. The Greek world is a scene of courts and kings, or of effete democracies where the orators cannot even talk as well as Demosthenes. The empire of Alexander has passed over the eastern Mediterranean. Alexandria is growing into a great capital, a civilized capital, a city with a great city population, with library, scholars, critics, and great learning, under the protection of a court. Its poets are elegant imitators, polished elegists, or epigrammatists, and there seems no prospect of a new birth of poetry. The Aegean islands are quiet. No more desperate struggles for liberty: no strains of Sappho or Archilochus. The most interesting island is perhaps Cos, an island fertile and beautiful, famous for its vines and weaving of fine stuffs. It has a close connexion with the Alexandrian court and forms a kind of ‘Villegiatura’ for it. There is in the island a famous school of medicine, and also a literary coterie, with Philetas as its leader, and Philetas is struck with the quaint idea of disguising himself and his friends as shepherds in the poems they write about each other. The idea seems an amusing device for escaping from the academic atmosphere of Alexandria.