Elegīa
（
ἐλεγεῖον, a distich consisting of an hexameter line
followed by a pentameter; then in the plural, a collection of such distichs, and hence
ἐλεγεία). The general term in Greek for any poem written in
the elegiac metre, a combination of the dactylic hexameter and pentameter in a couplet. The
word
ἔλεγος is probably not Greek, but borrowed from the
Lydians, and means a plaintive melody accompanied by the flute. How it happened that the word
was applied to elegiac poetry, the earliest representatives of which by no means confined it
to mournful subjects, is doubtful. It may be that the term was chosen only in reference to the
musical setting, the elegy having originally been accompanied by the flute. Like the epic, the
elegy was a production of the Ionians of Asia Minor. (See
Epos.) Its dialect was the same as that of the epos, and its metre only a
variation of the epic metre, the pentameter being no more than an abbreviation of the
hexameter. The elegy marks the first transition from the epic to lyric proper. The earliest
representatives of the elegy, Callinus of Ephesus (about B.C. 700) and Tyrtaeus of Aphidnae in
Attica (about B.C. 600), gave it a decidedly warlike and political direction, and so did Solon
(B.C. 640-559) in his earlier poems, though his later elegies have mostly a contemplative
character. The elegies of Theognis of Megara (about B.C. 540), though gnomic and erotic, are
essentially political. The first typical representative of the erotic elegy was Mimnermus of
Colophon, an elder contemporary of Solon. The elegy of mourning or sorrow was brought to
perfection by
Simonides (q.v.) of Ceos (died B.C.
469). After him the emotional element predominated. Antimachus of Colophon (about B.C. 400)
gave the elegy a learned tinge, and was thus the prototype of the elegiac poets of Alexandria,
Phanocles, Philetas of Cos, Hermesianax of Colophon, and
Callimachus (q.v.) of Cyrené, the master of them all. The
subject of the Alexandrian elegy is sometimes the passion of love, with its pains and
pleasures, treated through the medium of images and similes taken from mythology; sometimes
learned narrative of fable and history, from which personal emotion is absent.
This type of elegy, with its learned and obscure manner, was taken up and imitated at Rome
towards the end of the Republic. The Romans soon easily surpassed their Greek masters both in
warmth and sincerity of feeling and in finish of style. The elegies of Catullus are among
their earliest attempts; but in the Augustan Age, in the hands of Cornelius Gallus ,
Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, the elegiac style was entirely appropriated by Latin
literature. Ovid, in his
Fasti, showed how a learned subject could be treated
in this metre. From his time onward the elegiac metre was constantly employed, and was used
even in schools for practice in style. In the later literature it was applied, like the epic
metre, to every possible subject, as, for instance, by Rutilius Namatianus in the description
of his return from Rome to Gaul (A.D. 416). In the sixth century A.D. the poet Maximianus,
born in Etruria at the beginning of that century, is a late instance of a genuine elegiac
poet.
On the elegy, see an article by O. Crusius in the
Wochenschrift für klass.
Phil. for 1885; Eichner,
De Poetarum Lat. Distichis (Breslau,
1866); Prien,
Symmetrie und Responsion der röm. Elegie
(Lübeck, 1867); Madvig in his
Adversaria, ii. 110; and Gruppe,
Die röm. Elegie, ed. by Schulze
(Berlin, 1884).
