Now I don't know whether any one can detect in this any resemblance to a paean, when the author expressly states in it that Hermias is dead, when he says—
And now for you Atarneus' pride,Nor has the song the burden, which all paeans have, of Io Paean, as that song written on Lysander the Spartan, which really is a paean, has; a song which Duris, in his book entitled The Annals of the Samians, says is sung in Samos. That also was a pæan which was written in honour of Craterus the Macedonian, of which Alexinus the logician was the author, as Hermippus the pupil of Callimachus says in the first book of his Essay on Aritotle. And this song is sung at Delphi, with a boy playing the lyre as an accompaniment [p. 1114] to it. The song, too, addressed to Agemon of Corinth, the father of Alcyone, which the Corinthians sang, contains the burden of the paean. And this burden, too, is even added by Polemo Periegetes to his letter addressed to Aranthius. The song also which the Rhodians sing, addressed to Ptolemy the first king of Egypt, is a paean: for it contains the burden Io Paean, as Georgus tells us in his essay on the Sacrifices at Rhodes. And Philochorus says that the Athenians sing paeans in honour of Antigonus and Demetrius, which were composed by Hermippus of Cyzicus, on an occasion when a great many poets had a contest as to which could compose the finest paean, and the victory was adjudged to Hermippus. And, indeed, Aristotle himself, in his Defence of himself from this accusation of impiety, (unless the speech is a spurious one,) says—“For if I had wished to offer sacrifice to Hermias as an immortal being, I should never have built him a tomb as a mortal; nor if I had wished to make him out to be a god, should I have honoured him with funeral obsequies like a man.”
Trusting in others' faith, has nobly died.
