It was not, however, until the invention of the lyric proper, whether individual to the poet, or choral, that the full richness of possible rhythms became obvious to the Greeks. The lyric inspiration came originally from the island of Lesbos, and it passed down through the Asiatic archipelago before it reached the mainland of Greece. The Lesbians cultivated an ode-poetry, the enchanting beauty of which can still be realized in measure from what remains to us of the writings of Sappho and Alcaeus. There is a stanza known as the Sapphic and another known as the Alcaic.
The name of Stesichorus of Himera points to the belief of antiquity that he was the earliest poet who gave form to the choral song ; he must have been called the "choir-setter" because he arranged and wrote for choirs semi-epic verse of a new kind, "made up of halves of the epic hexameter, interspersed with short variations—epitrites, anapaests or mere syncopae—just enough to break the dactylic swing, to make the verse lyrical" (Gilbert Murray). But it appears to be to Arlon that the artistic form of the dithyramb is due. Pindar gathered the various in ventions together, and exercised his genius upon them all.
After the happy event of the Persian War, Athens became the centre of literary activity in Greece, and here the great school of drama developed itself, using for its vehicle, in dialogue, monologue and chorus, nearly all the metres which earlier ages and distant provinces had invented. The verse-form which the dramatists preferred to use was almost exclusively the iambic tri meter, a form which adapted itself equally well to tragedy and to comedy. Aeschylus employed for his choruses a great number of lyric measures, which Sophocles and Euripides reduced and regulated. With the age of the dramatists the creative power of the Greeks in versification came to an end, and the revival of poetic enthusiasm in the Alexandrian age brought with it no talent for fresh metrical inventions.
bearing the stamp of a widely recognized cultivation, threw the old national verse back into oblivion. Latin verse, then, began in a free but loyal modification of the principles of Greek verse. Plautus was particularly ambitious and skilful in this work, and, aided by a native genius for metre, he laid down the basis of Latin dramatic versification. Terence was a feebler and at the same time a more timid metrist. In satire, the iambic and trochaic measures were carefully adapted by Ennius and Lucilius. The dactylic hexameter followed, and Ennius, in all matters of verse a daring innovator, directly imitated in his Annales the epic measure of the Greeks. To him also is attributed the introduction of the elegiac distich. The dactylic hexameter was forthwith adopted as the leading metre of the Roman poets, and the basis upon which all future versification was to be erected was firmly laid down before the death of Ennius in 169 B.C. Lucilius fol lowed, but perhaps with some tendency to retrogression, for the Latin critics seem to have looked upon his metre as wanting both in melody and elasticity. Lucretius, on the other hand, made a further advance on the labours of Ennius, in his study of the hexameter. Lest, however, this great form of verse should take too exclusive a place in the imagination of the Romans, a younger generation began to imitate the lyrical measures of the Greeks with remarkable success. These poets left the rigid school of Ennius, and sought to emulate the Alexandrians of their own age : we see the result in the lyric measures used so gracefully and with such brilliant ease by Catullus. The versification of the Romans reached its highest point of polish in the Augustan age, in the writings of Tibullus, Propertius, Virgil and Ovid. Horace in his odes and epodes was not content with the soft Alexandrian models, but aimed at achieving more vigorous effects by an imitation of the older Greek models.