Little is known of the efforts made to solve this poetical problem. The Dorian Peisander, of Cameirus in Rhodes, is named as the author of an epic poem on Heracles, a
Heracleia1. He seems to have confined himself to the ‘labours’ which Heracles performed for Eurystheus; and he was the first poet, we are told, who gave Heracles the lion's skin and the club
2. Peisander is usually placed about 650 B.C.; but, according to one view, that date is too early
3. In the Alexandrian age he enjoyed a high repute.
The Ionian Panyasis
4 of Halicarnassus,
circ. 480 B.C., also
The Heracleia of Panyasis. |
composed a
Heracleia, in no less than fourteen books. He took a wider range than Peisander's, and aimed at a comprehensive digest of all the principal legends concerning Heracles. Merits of style and arrangement made him popular; but he did not reach the Homeric level, or work in the Homeric spirit
5. Possibly his large composition, with its survey of heroic deeds in many lands, may have borne some analogy to the great proseepic of his younger kinsman, Herodotus. That kinship interests us here, since it increases the probability that the epic of Panyasis may have been known to the author of the
Trachiniae.
But to minds in sympathy with Homeric epos it would be evident that there was another way of dealing with the theme of Heracles; a way different from that of Peisander, and still more different from that of Panyasis. Some one episode might be singled out from the mass of legends, and developed by itself, as an epic on a small scale. Hesiod and the Hesiodic school worked thus; they produced, for instance, the
Marriage-feast of Ceÿx, relating how Heracles was entertained by that king of Trachis; the
Aegimius, turning on the league of Heracles with that Dorian prince; and the extant
Shield of Heracles, concerning his fight with Cycnus.
A notable epic of this class was the
Capture of Oechalia, “
Οἰχαλίας ἅλωσις”, ascribed to the Ionian Creophylus of Samos, whom tradition called the friend, or even the son-in-law, of Homer
6. An epigram of Callimachus
7 attests the fame of this poem, which was probably as old at least as the eighth century B.C., and must have had the genuine ring of Homeric epos. The subject was the passion of Heracles for Iolè, and the war which, in order to win her, he made on Oechalia, the city of her father Eurytus, which was placed, as by Sophocles, in Euboea. It is not, known whether this epic introduced Deianeira, the envenomed robe, and the hero's death on Mount Oeta
8. But in any case it must have been one of the principal sources from which Sophocles derived his material.
Lyric poets on Heracles. Archilochus. |
