STESICHORUS of Himera, a very famous lyric poet, lived between 630 and 550 b.c. His name was originally Tisias, if we may trust Suidas, but it was changed to Stesichorus on account of his eminence in choral poetry. He was famed in antiquity for the richness and splendour of his imagination and his style, although Quintilian censures his redundancy and Hermogenes remarks on the excessive sweetness that results from his abundant use of epithets. We are told that he warned his fellow-citizens against Phalaris, whom they had chosen as their general, by relating to them the well-known fable of the horse and the stag. The story that he was struck blind for slandering Helen in a poem, and afterwards recovered his sight when he had sung a recantation, is told first by Plato, and afterwards, with many additions, by Pausanias and others. We possess some fragments of the former poem, censuring the daughters of Tyndareus, who “wed two, nay three husbands, and leave their lords” (Fr. 26), and three lines from the palinode, “This is no true tale, nor yet wentest thou in the strong benched ships, or camest to the tower of Troy” (Fr. 32). It seems probable that Stesichorus did really write his recantation in consequence of a dream which he had soon after composing his poem on Helen; and his is not the only case in literature where an apparently miraculous cure is said to have followed some such act of atonement. We possess about thirty fragments of his poems, not counting single words, preserved in Athenaeus and elsewhere. None of them is longer than six lines. They are written in the Doric dialect, with epic licences and occasional Aeolisms; the metre is dactylico-trochaic. Brief as they are, they show us what Longinus meant by calling Stesichorus “most like Homer”; they ...